Good afternoon. It's an honour to be here, and I want to thank the committee for inviting me to talk with you today. I'm going to talk with you about the impact of electromagnetic fields on male and female reproduction from current devices. I want to stress that in Safety Code 6 they said they did not include some of the 140 studies because the exposure used was not adequate.

I'm going to skip talking to you a great deal about my credentials. They are in the next slide; you have an opportunity to look at them later.

I'll just say that I did my doctorate at the University of Chicago. I did three post-doctorates, the last of which was a post-doctoral master's in public health at Johns Hopkins University. For 10 years I was the founding director of the board on environmental studies and toxicology at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. I also was a member of the group awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore in 2007 for serving as a lead author on several chapters of the report for the United Nations on climate change. I was the founding director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, and I've received various awards, including a lifetime achievement award from Green America, as well as a National Book Award for my first book, When Smoke Ran Like Water. I've worked with officials at the United Nations, and in governments in India, Japan, and Canada.

I'm pleased to be here today to try to work with the committee as it looks for advice on a very important and troubling issue. I want to stress that in my remarks today I'm going to talk to you about experiments that have been done on male and female animals—but one of those animals happens to be human, and I'll get to that in a moment—with currently used cellphones at current exposures. I want to stress that. What we see when we look at the studies that have been done at the Cleveland Clinic—which I think is well-known as an outstanding research centre—at the Australian national centre for research on male health, and in other institutions around the world is that they have all reported similar results to what I'm going to show you here today.

They've taken sperm from men and they have put them into two test tubes. One test tube gets exposed to cellphone radiation for two hours. The other test tube does not. Now, sperm will die because they're not supposed to live in a test tube, but the rate at which they die and what happens to them in that two hours tells you a lot biologically.

Let's look at the results from Professor John Aitken, who is Cambridge University trained. He is, in fact, a knight, so it's Sir John Aitken. If you look on the top left of the slide, at the control, the white box, those are the sperm that lived after two hours with nothing being done to them. On the right, the lower black box, is the number of sperm that lived after two hours of being exposed to a normal operating cellphone. On the other right, you see what we call a measure of motility, which is how well the sperm swim, and we need millions of sperm to make one healthy baby so they have to be good swimmers. Then on the bottom left you see an indication of damage to DNA, specifically the DNA on the mitochondria of the sperm—the mitochondria are the engines of the sperm—and you see that the control sperm on the bottom left have very little damage after two hours. The exposed sperm have almost four times more damage, as measured by standard laboratory tests conducted, again, by the equivalent of the National Institutes of Health in Australia.

Now, my colleague Stan Glantz, who is a professor of bio-statistics at the University of California, San Francisco, has concluded that based on all of the evidence—and I'm just showing you one study here—cellphones do, in fact, damage sperm, and they do it at a level that does not produce heat. So when Safety Code 6 repeatedly said there were no proven effects without heat, that did not include these studies. I think this is a very big omission, and I would think all of you here would understand that we have to protect sperm if we want to protect the continuation and the health of the species.

The next slide shows you a very interesting study that was done with a laptop directly over the petri dishes with the sperm. It was insulated so there was no heat, because we know that heat will kill sperm. This study again shows a significant increase in damage to the sperm that had been exposed to the laptop as opposed to the control sperm. These are very important results. Nowadays they call them tablets, because they belong on tables. They're tested 20 centimetres away from a body. Industry has advice about how to use these things, and I applaud them because recently they've become more forthright with advice, which I'm going to show at the end, about how to use these things safely.

I think the government's job is to make sure people know what advice is buried now, including that a laptop is supposed to be kept 20 centimetres away from the body. All of these little children with their iPads right next to their bodies.... Their arms aren't even 20 centimetres long.

I recently came from India where I was working with the government. It is conducting major research that is quite outstanding, and I think would offer some examples to what could be done easily here in Canada.

The Indian government sponsored research on mobile phone radiation, using a computer to generate the mobile phone signal. It was a standard generated signal. They exposed middle-aged male rats—maybe an age group of interest to this group—to cellphone radiation for two hours a day, for just 45 days. At the end of that, they did sophisticated biochemistry, and found increased DNA, lower testosterone, and lower fertility when the animals were allowed to breed.

If you look at the testes, which they did here, you see the normal testes—that nice, round, regular barrier. That's what we need. We need cells to be intact, to have a nice membrane around them. Cellphone radiation, as Dr. Herbert just said very eloquently, can damage membranes. It can disrupt the integrity of the cell. The damage test, as you see on the right, comes from the animals that were exposed; the ones on the left were not.

Now I want to show you a study that I think may explain some of what Dr. Herbert's results suggest. I want to stress that what I'm showing you here is one study; there are many of this type. They were done, in this case by a laboratory in Turkey, and were sponsored by NATO. NATO sponsored this research for years because the research is on radar. Radar, of course, is a form of microwaves. Cellphones emit microwave radiation as a two-way radio. The term used to describe that radiation is radio frequency energy. It is not a precise term. It is in fact a small form of radar. It is a form of microwave radiation. None of these terms—microwave or radio frequency radiation—is a precise term.

This study done by Turkey, and it's exemplary of others, took two groups of animals and exposed one group prenatally to a computer-generated signal to mimic a current cellphone. The results I think are quite stunning. If you look on the left, you will see healthy cells, all those nice, round, little circles. Those membranes are intact on the left, and you see them magnified—the control. If you look on the right and at the top, you see fewer cells and more damage.

I want to stress that this could explain part of what Dr. Herbert is talking about. What we're seeing here are alterations in DNA and membrane damage caused by prenatal exposure to cellphones. We don't know what's behind this epidemic of autism—we don't—but certainly this is an important hypothesis that needs to be fully explored and can be done.

The next slide shows the results of Dr. Hugh Taylor's work at Yale, which I know that Dr. Herbert is quite aware of. That study found that prenatally exposed animals produced offspring with significant behavioural problems, as measured by standard assays; essentially, a form of hyperactivity in the animals. Dr. Taylor says that the animals were literally bouncing off the walls, and this could be an example. We talked about Dr. Suleyman Kaplan's work on the brain; this may be showing you the consequences of that.

Finally, new data, which I'm sharing here with the committee for the first time, comes from the Korean government. Their ministry of science has released these numbers showing rapid growth in smartphone addiction rates—I need not tell you that there is an addiction going on, and it's an addiction classified by physicians and others as needing treatment, by the way—and a change in the number of dementia patients under age 65, when dementia is only thought to occur in inherited cases of risk.

Where are we now?

As in the opening comments, several other speakers have indicated that we must act on facts and we must take precaution.

Now let's talk about certainty. We asked about how certain we were about health effects. We can't be certain because epidemiology, which I do, predicts nothing; it only proves the past. Epidemiology can tell you about the past. It cannot and should not be used to try to set public policy. We can't wait for proof of dead bodies or sick people at this point. We have to act on what we know to prevent harm.

Several different governments have taken steps, and I will mention a few of them to you.

In Belgium, France, and Taiwan it is literally against the law to give a phone to a child aged two, and in Belgium and France, it's age seven. They're not allowed. There's actually a national law that was passed. Information on this can be found on our website. India has informally advised that nobody should use a phone for more than an hour a day, in government policy.

Health Canada's document actually supports this statement, and I commend Health Canada and I commend Safety Code 6 because it did announce that we should take special steps for children. That is in fact a policy decision, because we don't want to treat our children or the rest of us like lab rats in an experiment with no controls.

Simply to give you an idea of what the industry has done, Lloyd's of London and Swiss Re will not cover health damages from cellphones. They will not.

All the warnings appear now inside these devices. The bill that is proposed here would give those warnings and make them available publicly. We have done that on a website called showthefineprint.org. You can find that and more information on our website, and that is c4st.org. In short, it's better to be safe than sorry.

I'll be glad to take your questions.

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