The Invisible Rainbow van Arthur Firstenberg is een heel bijzonder boek. Het is ook een heel actueel boek. In het boek legt Firstenberg een link tussen de voortgaande elektricificatie van de wereld en het uitbreken van epidemieën, met name "griepepidemiën". Maar ook andere "ziektes" die tegenwoordig schering en inslag zijn, vooral in de Westerse Wereld, worden gekoppeld aan het toenemend gebruik van elektriciteit.
- Hij merkt vooreerst op dat "angststoornissen" vrijwel onbekend worden voor 1860 wanneer de eerste telegraaflijnen werden aangelegd. Idem voor de griep:
“Anxiety disorder,” afflicting one-sixth of humanity, did not exist before the 1860s, when telegraph wires first encircled the earth. No hint of it appears in the medical literature before 1866. Influenza, in its present form, was invented in 1889, along with alternating current. It is with us always, like a familiar guest—so familiar that we have forgotten that it wasn’t always so. Many of the doctors who were flooded with the disease in 1889 had never seen a case before. - Idem voor nog andere ziekten:
Prior to the 1860s, diabetes was so rare that few doctors saw more than one or two cases during their lifetime. It, too, has changed its character: diabetics were once skeletally thin. Obese people never developed the disease. Heart disease at that time was the twenty-fifth most common illness, behind accidental drowning. It was an illness of infants and old people. It was extraordinary for anyone else to have a diseased heart. Cancer was also exceedingly rare. Even tobacco smoking, in non-electrified times, did not cause lung cancer. - Door deze observaties kwam men terecht bij de gevolgen van elektriciteit op het lichaam:
Observations of these kinds came quickly and abundantly, so that by the end of the eighteenth century a basic body of knowledge had been built up about the effects of the electric fluid—usually the positive variety—on the human body. It increased both the pulse rate, as we have seen, and the strength of the pulse. It augmented all of the secretions of the body. Electricity caused salivation, and made tears to flow, and sweat to run. It caused the secretion of ear wax, and nasal mucus. It made gastric juice flow, stimulating the appetite. It made milk to be let down, and menstrual blood to issue. It made people urinate copiously and move their bowels. Most of these actions were useful in electrotherapy, and would continue to be so until the early twentieth century. Other effects were purely unwanted. Electrification almost always caused dizziness, and sometimes a sort of mental confusion, or “istupidimento,” as the Italians called it.17 It commonly produced headaches, nausea, weakness, fatigue, and heart palpitations. Sometimes it caused shortness of breath, coughing, or asthma-like wheezing. It often caused muscle and joint pains, and sometimes mental depression. Although electricity usually caused the bowels to move, often with diarrhea, repeated electrification could result in constipation. Electricity caused both drowsiness and insomnia. - Vooral het zenuwstelsel voelt de impact:
(As) a messenger service, the nervous system can be poisoned by toxic chemicals. As a network of fine transmission wires, it can easily be damaged or unbalanced by a great or unfamiliar electric load. This has effects on both mind and body that we know today as anxiety disorder. - 1889 volgde een dodelijke griepepidemie en sindsdien is griep voortdurend bij ons (voorheen enkel zeer sporadisch), en heeft bijna iedereen er last van:
And in 1889, as if the heavens had suddenly opened as well, doctors in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia were overwhelmed by a flood of critically ill patients suffering from a strange disease that seemed to have come like a thunderbolt from nowhere, a disease that many of these doctors had never seen before. That disease was influenza, and that pandemic lasted four continuous years and killed at least one million people.
Suddenly and inexplicably, influenza, whose descriptions had remained consistent for thousands of years, changed its character in 1889. Flu had last seized most of England in November 1847, over half a century earlier. The last flu epidemic in the United States had raged in the winter of 1874–1875. Since ancient times, influenza had been known as a capricious, unpredictable disease, a wild animal that came from nowhere, terrorized whole populations at once without warning and without a schedule, and disappeared as suddenly and mysteriously as it had arrived, not to be seen again for years or decades.
It behaved unlike any other illness, was thought not to be contagious, and received its name because its comings and goings were said to be governed by the “influence” of the stars.
But in 1889 influenza was tamed. From that year forward it would be present always, in every part of the world. It would vanish mysteriously as before, but it could be counted on to return, at more or less the same time, the following year. And it has never been absent since. - Griep is intussen de meest uitgebreid onderzochte ziekte ter wereld:
Like “anxiety disorder,” influenza is so common and so seemingly familiar that a thorough review of its history is necessary to unmask this stranger and convey the enormity of the public health disaster that occurred one hundred and thirty years ago. It’s not that we don’t know enough about the influenza virus. We know more than enough. The microscopic virus associated with this disease has been so exhaustively studied that scientists know more about its tiny life cycle than about any other single microorganism. But this has been a reason to ignore many unusual facts about this disease, including the fact that it is not contagious. - Er lijkt een verband te zijn tussen de magnetische activiteit van de zon en griepepidemieën:
In 2001, Canadian astronomer Ken Tapping, together with two British Columbia physicians, were the latest scientists to confirm, yet again, that for at least the last three centuries influenza pandemics have been most likely to occur during peaks of solar magnetic activity—that is, at the height of each eleven-year sun cycle. - R.Edgar Hope-Simpsom een echte expert over de griep schreeft een boek in 1992 en verwierp het idee van transmissie van mens tot mens:
Such a trend is not the only aspect of this disease that has long puzzled virologists. In 1992, one of the world’s authorities on the epidemiology of influenza, R. Edgar Hope-Simpson, published a book in which he reviewed the essential known facts and pointed out that they did not support a mode of transmission by direct human-to-human contact. Hope-Simpson had been perplexed by influenza for a long time, in fact ever since he had treated its victims as a young general practitioner in Dorset, England, during the 1932–1933 epidemic—the very epidemic during which the virus that is associated with the disease in humans was first isolated. But during his 71-year career Hope-Simpson’s questions were never answered. “The sudden explosion of information about the nature of the virus and its antigenic reactions in the human host,” he wrote in 1992, had only “added to the features calling for explanation.” - Waarom is de griep verbonden aan seizoenen?
Why is influenza seasonal? he still wondered. Why is influenza almost completely absent except during the few weeks or months of an epidemic? Why do flu epidemics end? Why don’t out-of-season epidemics spread? How do epidemics explode over whole countries at once, and disappear just as miraculously, as if suddenly prohibited? He could not figure out how a virus could possibly behave like this. Why does flu so often target young adults and spare infants and the elderly? How is it possible that flu epidemics traveled at the same blinding speed in past centuries as they do today? How does the virus accomplish its so-called “vanishing trick”? - Waarom verdwijnt een bepaalde "variant" ineens?
This refers to the fact that when a new strain of the virus appears, the old strain, between one season and the next, has vanished completely, all over the world at once. Hope-Simpson listed twenty-one separate facts about influenza that puzzled him and that seemed to defy explanation if one assumed that it was spread by direct contact. - Is griep "latent" aanwezig in de mens of dier en wordt het virus "geactiveerd" wanneer de juiste omgevingsfactoren voorhanden zijn (niet noodzakelijk weer!)?
Shope, and later Hope-Simpson, proposed that the flu is not in fact spread from person to person, or pig to pig, in the normal way, but that it instead remains latent in human or swine carriers, who are scattered in large numbers throughout their communities until the virus is reactivated by an environmental trigger of some sort. Hope-Simpson further proposed that the trigger is connected to seasonal variations in solar radiation, and that it may be electromagnetic in nature, as a good many of his predecessors during the previous two centuries had suggested.
Others who have connected influenza with sunspots or atmospheric electricity include John Yeung (2006), Fred Hoyle (1990), J. H. Douglas Webster (1940), Aleksandr Chizhevskiy (1936), C. Conyers Morrell (1936), W. M. Hewetson (1936), Sir William Hamer (1936), Gunnar Edström (1935), Clifford Gill (1928), C. M. Richter (1921), Willy Hellpach (1911), Weir Mitchell (1893), Charles Dana (1890), Louise Fiske Bryson (1890), Ludwig Buzorini (1841), Johann Schönlein (1841), and Noah Webster (1799). In 1836, Heinrich Schweich observed that all physiological processes produce electricity, and proposed that an electrical disturbance of the atmosphere may prevent the body from discharging it. He repeated the then-common belief that the accumulation of electricity within the body causes the symptoms of influenza. No one has yet disproven this. - Griep is een ziekte veroorzaakt door elektriciteit? Zo ja, dan is het géén "besmettelijke ziekte"!
If influenza is primarily an electrical disease, a response to an electrical disturbance of the atmosphere, then it is not contagious in the ordinary sense. The patterns of its epidemics should prove this, and they do. For example, the deadly 1889 pandemic began in a number of widely scattered parts of the world. Severe outbreaks were reported in May of that year simultaneously in Bukhara, Uzbekistan; Greenland; and northern Alberta.11 Flu was reported in July in Philadelphia12 and in Hillston, a remote town in Australia,13 and in August in the Balkans.14 This pattern being at odds with prevailing theories, many historians have pretended that the 1889 pandemic didn’t “really” start until it had seized the western steppes of Siberia at the end of September and that it then spread in an orderly fashion from there outward throughout the rest of the world, person to person by contagion.
But the trouble is that the disease still would have had to travel faster than the trains and ships of the time. It reached Moscow and St. Petersburg during the third or fourth week of October, but by then, influenza had already been reported in Durban, South Africa15 and Edinburgh, Scotland.16 New Brunswick, Canada,17 Cairo, 18 Paris,19 Berlin,20 and Jamaica21 were reporting epidemics in November; London, Ontario on December 4;22 Stockholm on December 9;23 New York on December 11;24 Rome on December 12;25 Madrid on December 13;26 and Belgrade on December 15.27 Influenza struck explosively and unpredictably, over and over in waves until early 1894. It was as if something fundamental had changed in the atmosphere, as if brush fires were being ignited by some unknown vandal randomly, everywhere in the world.
One observer in East Central Africa, which was struck in September 1890, asserted that influenza had never before appeared in that part of Africa at all, not within the memory of the oldest living inhabitants.28 “Influenza,” said Dr. Benjamin Lee of the Pennsylvania State Board of Health, “spreads like a flood, inundating whole sections in an hour… It is scarcely conceivable that a disease which spreads with such astonishing rapidity, goes through the process of re-development in each person infected, and is only communicated from person to person or by infected articles.”
An 1857 report was so compelling that William Beveridge included it in his 1975 textbook on influenza: “The English warship Arachne was cruising off the coast of Cuba ‘without any contact with land.’ No less than 114 men out of a crew of 149 fell ill with influenza and only later was it learnt that there had been outbreaks in Cuba at the same time.” - De verspreiding van griep is te snel om sprake te kunnen zijn van "contagion", maar elektriciteit kan wel een verklaring zijn:
The speed at which influenza travels, and its random and simultaneous pattern of spread, has perplexed scientists for centuries, and has been the most compelling reason for some to continue to suspect atmospheric electricity as the cause, despite the known presence of an extensively studied virus. - Heel veel verwarring heerst rond de griep. Diverse factoren dragen daartoe bij. Ten eerste zijn er veel symptomen die niets met een typische griep of longonsteking te maken hebben:
The role of the virus, which infects only the respiratory tract, has baffled some virologists because influenza is not only, or even mainly, a respiratory disease. Why the headache, the eye pain, the muscle soreness, the prostration, the occasional visual impairment, the reports of encephalitis, myocarditis, and pericarditis? Why the abortions, stillbirths, and birth defects?39 In the first wave of the pandemic of 1889 in England, neurological symptoms were most often prominent and respiratory symptoms absent.40 Most of Medical Officer Röhring’s 239 flu patients at Erlangen, Bavaria, had neurological and cardiovascular symptoms and no respiratory disease. Nearly one-quarter of the 41,500 cases of flu reported in Pennsylvania as of May 1, 1890 were classified as primarily neurological and not respiratory.41 Few of David Brakenridge’s patients in Edinburgh, or Julius Althaus’ patients in London, had respiratory symptoms. Instead they had dizziness, insomnia, indigestion, constipation, vomiting, diarrhea, “utter prostration of mental and bodily strength,” neuralgia, delirium, coma, and convulsions.
Upon recovery many were left with neurasthenia, or even paralysis or epilepsy. Anton Schmitz published an article titled “Insanity After Influenza” and concluded that influenza was primarily an epidemic nervous disease. C. H. Hughes called influenza a “toxic neurosis.”
Insane asylums filled up with patients who had had influenza, people suffering variously from profound depression, mania, paranoia, or hallucinations. “The number of admissions reached unprecedented proportions,” reported Albert Leledy at the Beauregard Lunatic Asylum, at Bourges, in 1891. “Admissions for the year exceed those of any previous year,” reported Thomas Clouston, superintending physician of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the Insane, in 1892. “No epidemic of any disease on record has had such mental effects,” he wrote.
In 1893, Althaus reviewed scores of articles about psychoses after influenza, and the histories of hundreds of his own and others’ patients who had gone insane after the flu during the previous three years. He was perplexed by the fact that the majority of psychoses after influenza were developing in men and women in the prime of their life, between the ages of 21 and 50, that they were most likely to occur after only mild or slight cases of the disease, and that more than one-third of these people had not yet regained their sanity.
The frequent lack of respiratory illness was also noted in the even deadlier 1918 pandemic. In his 1978 textbook Beveridge, who had lived through it, wrote that half of all influenza patients in that pandemic did not have initial symptoms of nasal discharge, sneezing, or sore throat.43 - Twee. De leeftijdsdistributie klopt niet.
The age distribution is also wrong for contagion. In other kinds of infectious diseases, like measles and mumps, the more aggressive a strain of virus is and the faster it spreads, the more rapidly adults build up immunity and the younger the population that gets it every year. According to Hope-Simpson, this means that between pandem- ics influenza should be attacking mainly very young children. But influenza keeps on stubbornly targeting adults; the average age is almost always between twenty and forty, whether during a pandemic or not. The year 1889 was no exception: influenza felled preferentially vigorous young adults in the prime of their life, as if it were maliciously choosing the strongest instead of the weakest of our species. - Drie. Het feit dat dieren op hetzelfde moment ook de ziekte krijgt, wijst op de rol van omgevingsfactoren:
Then there is the confusion about animal infections, which are so much in the news year after year, scaring us all about catching influenza from swine or birds. But the inconvenient fact is that throughout history, for thousands of years, all sorts of animals have caught the flu at the same time as humans. When the army of King Karlmann of Bavaria was seized by influenza in 876 A.D., the same disease also decimated the dogs and the birds.44 In later epidemics, up to and including the twentieth century, illness was commonly reported to break out among dogs, cats, horses, mules, sheep, cows, birds, deer, rabbits, and even fish at the same time as humans.45 Beveridge listed twelve epidemics during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in which horses caught the flu, usually one or two months before the humans. In fact, this association was considered so reliable that in early December 1889, Symes Thompson, observing flu-like illness in British horses, wrote to the British Medical Journal predicting an imminent outbreak in humans, a forecast which shortly proved true.46 During the 1918–1919 pandemic, monkeys and baboons perished in great numbers in South Africa and Madagascar, sheep in northwest England, horses in France, moose in northern Canada, and buffalo in Yellowstone.47 There is no mystery here. We are not catching the flu from animals, nor they from us.
If influenza is caused by abnormal electromagnetic conditions in the atmosphere, then it affects all living things at the same time, including living things that don’t share the same viruses or live closely with one another. - Hoe de verwarring oplossen?
The obstacle to unmasking the stranger that is influenza is the fact that it is two different things. Influenza is a virus and it is also a clinical illness. The confusion comes about because since 1933, human influenza has been defined by the organism that was discovered in that year, and not by clinical symptoms. If an epidemic strikes, and you come down with the same disease as everyone else, but an influenza virus can’t be isolated from your throat and you don’t develop antibodies to one, then you are said not to have influenza. But the fact is that although influenza viruses are associated in some way with disease epidemics, they have never been shown to cause them. Seventeen years of surveillance by Hope-Simpson in and around the community of Cirencester, England, revealed that despite popular belief, influenza is not readily communicated from one person to another within a household. Seventy percent of the time, even during the “Hong Kong flu” pandemic of 1968, only one person in a household would get the flu. If a second person had the flu, both often caught it on the same day, which meant that they did not catch it from each other. Sometimes different minor variants of the virus were circulating in the same village, even in the same household, and on one occasion two young brothers who shared a bed had different variants of the virus, proving that they could not have caught it from each other, or even from the same third person.48 William S. Jordan, in 1958, and P. G. Mann, in 1981, came to similar conclusions about the lack of spread within families. - De theorie dat de griep een besmettelijke ziektje is, heeft dus héél weinig bewijs achter zicht. Enkel correlaties, maar correlatie is géén causatie. Nog meer bewijs is het falen van vaccinatieprogramma's:
Another indication that something is wrong with prevailing theories is the failure of vaccination programs. Although vaccines have been proven to confer some immunity to particular strains of flu virus, several prominent virologists have admitted over the years that vaccination has done nothing to stop epidemics and that the disease still behaves just as it did a thousand years ago.49 In fact, after reviewing 259 vaccination studies from the British Medical Journal spanning 45 years, Tom Jefferson recently concluded that influenza vaccines have had essentially no impact on any real outcomes, such as school absences, working days lost, and flu-related illnesses and deaths. - Er is dus geen bewijs dat influenza besmettelijk is:
The embarrassing secret among virologists is that from 1933 until the present day, there have been no experimental studies proving that influenza—either the virus or the disease—is ever transmitted from person to person by normal contact. As we will see in the next chapter, all efforts to experimentally transmit it from person to person, even in the middle of the most deadly disease epidemic the world has ever known, have failed. - De griepedimie van 1918, het gebrek aan bewijs voor besmetting, en de ware oorzaak:
Over time, Isle of Wight disease took fewer and fewer bee lives as the insects seemed to adapt to whatever had changed in their environment. Places that had been attacked first recovered first. Then, in 1917, just as the bees on the Isle of Wight itself appeared to be regaining their former vitality, an event occurred that changed the electrical environment of the rest of the world. Millions of dollars of United States government money were suddenly mobilized in a crash program to equip the Army, Navy, and Air Force with the most modern communication capability possible. The entry of the United States into the Great War on April 6, 1917, stimulated an expansion of radio broadcasting that was as sudden and rapid as the 1889 expansion of electricity. Again it was the bees that gave the first warning.
“Mr. Charles Schilke of Morganville, Monmouth County, a beekeeper with considerable experience operating about 300 colonies reported a great loss of bees from the hives in one of his yards located near Bradevelt,” read one report, published in August 1918.5 “Thousands of dead were lying and thousands of dying bees were crawling about in the vicinity of the hive, collecting in groups on bits of wood, on stones and in depressions in the earth. The affected bees appeared to be practically all young adult workers about the age when they would normally do the first field work, but all ages of older bees were found. No abnormal condition within the hive was noticed at this time.” This outbreak was confined to Morganville, Freehold, Milhurst, and nearby areas of New Jersey, just a few miles seaward from one of the most powerful radio stations on the planet, the one in New Brunswick that had just been taken over by the government for service in the war. A 50,000-watt Alexanderson alternator had been installed in February of that year to supplement a less efficient 350,000-watt spark apparatus. Both provided power to a mile-long aerial consisting of 32 parallel wires supported by 12 steel towers 400 feet tall, broadcasting military communications across the ocean to the command in Europe. Radio came of age during the First World War. For long distance communications there were no satellites, and no shortwave equipment. Vacuum tubes had not yet been perfected. Transistors were decades into the future. It was the era of immense radio waves, inefficient aerials the size of small mountains, and spark gap transmitters that scattered radiation like buckshot all over the radio spectrum to interfere with everyone else’s signals. Oceans were crossed by brute force, three hundred thousand watts of electricity being supplied to those mountains to achieve a radiated power of perhaps thirty thousand. The rest was wasted as heat. Morse code could be sent but not voice. Reception was sporadic, unreliable.
When the United States entered the war in 1917, it changed the terrain in a hurry. The United States Navy already had one giant transmitter at Arlington, Virginia and a second at Darien, in the Canal Zone. A third, in San Diego, began broadcasting in May 1917, a fourth, at Pearl Harbor, on October 1 of that year, and a fifth, at Cavite, the Philippines, on December 19. The Navy also took over and upgraded private and foreign-owned stations at Lents, Oregon; South San Francisco, California; Bolinas, California; Kahuku, Hawaii; Heeia Point, Hawaii; Sayville, Long Island; Tuckerton, New Jersey; and New Brunswick, New Jersey. By late 1917, thirteen American stations were sending messages across two oceans.
Meanwhile the Navy had ordered a second, more powerful alternator for New Brunswick, of 200-kilowatt capacity. Installed in June, it too went on the air full time in September. New Brunswick immediately became the most powerful station in the world, outclassing Germany’s flagship station at Nauen, and was the first that transmitted both voice and telegraphic messages across the Atlantic Ocean clearly, continuously, and reliably. Its signal was heard over a large part of the earth. The disease that was called Spanish influenza was born during these months. It did not originate in Spain. It did, however, kill tens of millions all over the world, and it became suddenly more fatal in September of 1918. By some estimates the pandemic struck more than half a billion people, or a third of the world’s population. Even the Black Death of the fourteenth century did not kill so many in so short a period of time. No wonder everyone is terrified of its return.
The Spanish influenza apparently originated in the United States in early 1918, seemed to spread around the world on Navy ships, and first appeared on board those ships and in seaports and Naval stations. The largest early outbreak, laying low about 400 people, occurred in February in the Naval Radio School at Cambridge, Massachusetts.8 In March, influenza spread to Army camps where the Signal Corps was being trained in the use of the wireless: 1,127 men contracted influenza in Camp Funston, in Kansas, and 2,900 men in the Oglethorpe camps in Georgia. In late March and April, the disease spread to the civilian population, and around the world.
Its victims were often sick repeatedly for months at a time. One of the things that puzzled doctors the most was all of the bleeding. Ten to fifteen percent of flu patients seen in private practice,9 and up to forty percent of flu patients in the Navy10 suffered from nosebleeds, doctors sometimes describing the blood as “gushing” from the nostrils.11 Others bled from their gums, ears, skin, stomach, intestines, uterus, or kidneys, the most common and rapid route to death being hemorrhage in the lungs: flu victims drowned in their own blood. Autopsies revealed that as many as one-third of fatal cases had also hemorrhaged into their brain,12 and occasionally a patient appeared to be recovering from respiratory symptoms only to die of a brain hemorrhage.
“The regularity with which these various hemorrhages appeared suggested the possibility of there being a change in the blood itself,” wrote Drs. Arthur Erskine and B. L. Knight of Cedar Rapids, Iowa in late 1918. So they tested the blood from a large number of patients with influenza and pneumonia. “In every case tested without a single exception,” they wrote, “the coagulability of the blood was lessened, the increase in time required for coagulation varying from two and one-half to eight minutes more than normal. Blood was tested as early as the second day of infection, and as late as the twentieth day of convalescence from pneumonia, with the same results… Several local physicians also tested blood from their patients, and, while our records are at this time necessarily incomplete, we have yet to receive a report of a case in which the time of coagulation was not prolonged.” This is consistent not with any respiratory virus, but with what has been known about electricity ever since Gerhard did the first experiment on human blood in 1779. It is consistent with what is known about the effects of radio waves on blood coagulation.13 Erskine and Knight saved their patients not by fighting infection, but by giving them large doses of calcium lactate to facilitate blood clotting.
The prognosis was better if you were in poor physical condition. If you were undernourished, physically handicapped, anemic, or tuberculous, you were much less likely to get the flu and much less likely to die from it if you did.18 This was such a common observation that Dr. D. B. Armstrong wrote a provocative article, published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, titled “Influenza: Is it a Hazard to Be Healthy?” Doctors were seriously discussing whether they were actually giving their patients a death sentence by advising them to keep fit!
Yet another puzzling observation was that so few patients in 1918 had sore throats, runny noses, or other initial respiratory symptoms.21 But neurological symptoms, just as in the pandemic of 1889, were rampant, even in mild cases. They ranged from insomnia, stupor, dulled perceptions, unusually heightened perceptions, tingling, itching, and impairment of hearing to weakness or partial paralysis of the palate, eyelids, eyes, and various other muscles.22 The famous Karl Menninger reported on 100 cases of psychosis triggered by influenza, including 35 of schizophrenia, that he saw during a three-month period.23 Although the infectious nature of this illness was widely assumed, masks, quarantines, and isolation were all without effect.24 Even in an isolated country like Iceland the flu spread universally, in spite of the quarantining of its victims.
The disease seemed to spread impossibly fast. “There is no reason to suppose that it traveled more rapidly than persons could travel [but] it has appeared to do so,” wrote Dr. George A. Soper, Major in the United States Army.
“We entered the outbreak with a notion that we knew the cause of the disease, and were quite sure we knew how it was transmitted from person to person. Perhaps,” concluded Dr. Milton Rosenau, “if we have learned anything, it is that we are not quite sure what we know about the disease.”27 Earlier attempts to demonstrate contagion in horses had met with the same resounding failure. Healthy horses were kept in close contact with sick ones during all stages of the disease. Nose bags were kept on horses that had nasal discharges and high temperatures. Those nose bags were used to contain food for other horses which, however, stubbornly remained healthy. As a result of these and other attempts, Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Watkins-Pitchford of the British Army Veterinary Corps wrote in July 1917 that he could find no evidence that influenza was ever spread directly from one horse to another. - Andere grieppandemies kunnen gelinkt worden aan electrische technologie:
The other two influenza pandemics of the twentieth century, in 1957 and 1968, were also associated with milestones of electrical technology, pioneered once again by the United States.
Radar, first used extensively during World War II, was deployed on a spectacular scale by the United States during the mid-1950s, as it sought to surround itself with a triple layer of protection that would detect any nuclear attack.
The “Asian” influenza pandemic began about the end of February 1957 and lasted for more than a year. The bulk of the mortality occurred in the fall and winter of 1957-1958.
A decade later the United States launched the world’s first constellation of military satellites into orbit at an altitude of about 18,000 nautical miles, right in the heart of the outer Van Allen radiation belt. Called the Initial Defense Communication Satellite Program (IDCSP), its 28 satellites became operational after the last eight were launched on June 13, 1968. The “Hong Kong” flu pandemic began in July 1968 and lasted until March 1970.
In each case—in 1889, 1918, 1957, and 1968—the electrical envelope of the earth, which will be described in the next chapter, and to which we are all attached by invisible strings, was suddenly and profoundly disturbed. Those for whom this attachment was strongest, whose roots were most vital, whose life’s rhythms were tuned most closely to the accustomed pulsations of our planet—in other words, vigorous, healthy young adults, and pregnant women—those were the individuals who most suffered and died. Like an orchestra whose conductor has suddenly gone mad, their organs, their living instruments, no longer knew how to play. - Waarom?
Living organisms, as the drawing indicates, are part of the global circuit. Each of us generates our own electric fields, which keep us vertically polarized like the atmosphere, with our feet and hands negative with respect to our spine and head. Our negative feet walk on the negative ground, as our positive heads point to the positive sky. The complex electric circuits that course gently through our bodies are completed by ground and sky, and in this very real way the earth and sun, the Great Yin and the Great Yang of the Yellow Emperor’s Classic, are energy sources for life.
It is not widely appreciated that the reverse is also true: not only does life need the earth, but the earth needs life. The atmosphere, for example, exists only because green things have been growing for billions of years. Plants created the oxygen, all of it, and very likely the nitrogen too. Yet we fail to treat our fragile cushion of air as the irreplaceable treasure that it is, more precious than the rarest diamond. Because for every atom of coal or oil that we burn, for every molecule of carbon dioxide that we produce from them, we destroy forever one molecule of oxygen. The burning of fossil fuels, of ancient plants that once breathed life into the future, is really the undoing of creation.
Electrically, too, life is essential. Living trees rise hundreds of feet into the air from the negatively charged ground. And because most raindrops, except in thunderstorms, carry positive charge down to earth, trees attract rain out of the clouds, and the felling of trees contributes electrically towards a loss of rainfall where forests used to stand.
A large, rapid, qualitative change in the earth’s electromagnetic environment has occurred six times in history. In 1889, power line harmonic radiation began. From that year forward the earth’s magnetic field bore the imprint of power line frequencies and their harmonics. In that year, exactly, the natural magnetic activity of the earth began to be suppressed. This has affected all life on earth. The power line age was ushered in by the 1889 pandemic of influenza. In 1918, the radio era began. It began with the building of hundreds of powerful radio stations at LF and VLF frequencies, the frequencies guaranteed to most alter the magnetosphere. The radio era was ushered in by the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918. In 1957, the radar era began. It began with the building of hundreds of powerful early warning radar stations that littered the high latitudes of the northern hemisphere, hurling millions of watts of microwave energy skyward. Low-frequency components of these waves rode on magnetic field lines to the southern hemisphere, polluting it as well. The radar era was ushered in by the Asian flu pandemic of 1957. In 1968, the satellite era began. It began with the launch of dozens of satellites whose broadcast power was relatively weak. But since they were already in the magnetosphere, they had as big an effect on it as the small amount of radiation that managed to enter it from sources on the ground. The satellite era was ushered in by the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968. The other two mileposts of technology—the beginning of the wireless era and the activation of the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP)—belong to very recent times and will be discussed later in this book. - Electriciteit en pijn:
The normal electrical potentials of the body are also necessary for the perception of pain. The abolition of pain in a person’s arm, for example, whether caused by a chemical anesthetic, hypnosis, or acupuncture, is accompanied by a reversal of electrical polarity in that arm. - De rol van zink:
For the next forty years Peters found tremendous resistance to his idea that zinc toxicity was at all common, but growing evidence is now accumulating that this is so. Large amounts of zinc are in fact entering our environment, our homes, and our bodies from industrial processes, galvanized metals, and even the fillings in our teeth. Zinc is in denture cream and in motor oil. There is so much zinc in automobile tires that their constant erosion makes zinc one of the main components of road dust—which washes into our streams, rivers, and reservoirs, eventually getting into our drinking water.31 Wondering whether this was perhaps poisoning us all, a group of scientists from Brookhaven National Laboratory, the United States Geological Survey, and several universities raised rats on water supplemented with a low level of zinc. By three months of age, the rats already had memory deficits. By nine months of age, they had elevated levels of zinc in their brains.32 In a human experiment, pregnant women in a slum area of Bangladesh were given 30 milligrams of zinc daily, in the expectation that this would benefit the mental development and motor skills of their babies. The researchers found just the opposite.33 In a companion experiment, a group of Bangladeshi infants were given 5 milligrams of zinc daily for five months, with the same surprising result: the supplemented infants scored more poorly on standard tests of mental development.34 And a growing body of literature shows that zinc supplements worsen Alzheimer’s disease,35 and that chelation therapy to reduce zinc improves cognitive functioning in Alzheimer’s patients.36 An Australian team who examined autopsy specimens found that Alzheimer’s patients had double the amount of zinc in their brains as people without Alzheimer’s, and that the more severe the dementia, the higher the zinc levels.
Nutritionists have long been misled by using blood tests to judge the body’s stores of zinc; scientists are finding out that blood levels are not reliable, and that unless you are severely malnourished there is no relation between the amount of zinc in your diet and the level of zinc in your blood.38 In some neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, it is common to have high levels of zinc in the brain while having normal or low levels of zinc in the blood.39 In a number of diseases including diabetes and cancer, urinary zinc is high while blood zinc is low.40 It appears that the kidneys respond to the body’s total load of zinc, and not to the levels in the blood, so that blood levels can become low, not because of a zinc deficiency but because the body is overloaded with zinc and the kidneys are removing it from the blood as fast as they can. It also appears to be much more difficult than we used to think for people to become deficient by eating a zinc-poor diet; the body is amazingly capable of compensating for even extremely low levels of dietary zinc by increasing intestinal absorption and decreasing excretion through urine, stool, and skin.41 While the recommended dietary allowance for adult males is 11 milligrams per day, a man can take in as little as 1.4 milligrams of zinc a day and still maintain homeostasis and normal levels of zinc in the blood and tissues.42 But a person who increases his or her daily intake beyond 20 milligrams may risk toxic effects in the long term. - Wat veroorzaakt angstoornissen? Eveneens elektrische vergiftiging wellicht:
“Anxiety disorder,” which is rampant today, is most often diagnosed from its cardiac symptoms. Many suffering from an acute “anxiety attack” have heart palpitations, shortness of breath, and pain or pressure in the chest, which so often resemble an actual heart attack that hospital emergency rooms are visited by more patients who turn out to have nothing more than “anxiety” than by patients who prove to have something wrong with their hearts. And yet we recall from chapter 6 that “anxiety neurosis” was an invention of Sigmund Freud, a renaming of a disease formerly called neurasthenia, that became prevalent only in the late nineteenth century following the building of the first electrical communication systems. Radio wave sickness, described by Russian doctors in the 1950s, includes cardiac disturbances as a prominent feature.
When scientists in the Soviet Union began reporting that they could modify the rhythm of the heart at will with microwave radiation, Frey took a special interest. N. A. Levitina, in Moscow, had found that she could either speed up an animal’s heart rate or slow it down, depending on which part of the animal’s body she irradiated. Irradiating the back of an animal’s head quickened its heart rate, while irradiating the back of its body, or its stomach, slowed it down.24 - Hartziekten en electriciteit:
What is even more remarkable is that the death rates from heart disease in unelectrified rural areas of the United States in 1931, before the Rural Electrification Program got into gear, were still as low as the death rates for the whole United States prior to the beginning of the heart disease epidemic in the nineteenth century.
In 1850, the first census year in which mortality data were collected, a total of 2,527 deaths from heart disease were recorded in the nation. Heart disease ranked twenty-fifth among causes of death in that year. About as many people died from accidental drowning as from heart disease. Heart disease was something that occurred mainly in young children and in old age, and was predominantly a rural rather than an urban disease because farmers lived longer than city-dwellers.
1910 was the first year in which the mortality in cities surpassed that in the countryside. But the greatest disparities emerged in the countryside. In the northeastern states, which in 1910 had the greatest use of telegraphs, telephones, and now electric lights and power, and the densest networks of wires crisscrossing the land, the rural areas had as much mortality from cardiovascular disease, or more, than the cities. The rural mortality rate of Connecticut was then 234, of New York 279, and of Massachusetts 296. By contrast Colorado’s rural rate was still 100, and Washington’s 92. Kentucky’s rural rate, at 88.5, was only 44 percent of its urban rate, which was 202.
The Framingham Heart Study showed that at any given age the chance of having a first heart attack was essentially the same during the 1990s as it was during the 1960s.69 This came as something of a surprise. By giving people statin drugs to lower their cholesterol, doctors thought they were going to save people from having clogged arteries, which was supposed to automatically mean healthier hearts. It hasn’t turned out that way. And in another study, scientists involved in the Minnesota Heart Survey discovered in 2001 that although fewer hospital patients were being diagnosed with coronary heart disease, more patients were being diagnosed with heart-related chest pain. In fact, between 1985 and 1995 the rate of unstable angina had increased by 56 percent in men and by 30 percent in women.70 - De link tussen electrificatie & hartziekten zie je ook in de ontwikkelingslanden:
Developing countries are no better off. They have already followed the developed countries down the primrose path of electrification, and they are following us even faster to the wholesale embrace of wireless technology. The consequences are inevitable. Heart disease was once unimportant in low-income nations. It is now the number one killer of human beings in every region of the world except one. Only in sub-Saharan Africa, in 2017, was heart disease still outranked by diseases of poverty—AIDS and pneumonia—as a cause of mortality. In spite of the billions being spent on conquering heart disease, the medical community is still groping in the dark. It will not win this war so long as it fails to recognize that the main factor that has been causing this pandemic for a hundred and fifty years is the electrification of the world. - Het gewijzigde ziektebeeld van diabetes, obesitas en de rol van elektriciteit:
Insulin resistance—which accounts for the vast majority of diabetes in the world today—did not exist before the late nineteenth century. Neither did obese diabetic patients. Almost all people with diabetes were insulindeficient, and they were universally thin: since insulin is needed in order for muscle and fat cells to absorb glucose, people with little or no insulin will waste away. They pee away their glucose instead of using it for energy, and survive by burning their stores of body fat. In fact, overweight diabetics were at first so unusual that late-nineteenth-century doctors couldn’t quite believe the change in the disease—and some of them didn’t. One of these, John Milner Fothergill, a prominent London physician, wrote a letter to the Philadelphia Medical Times in 1884, in which he stated: “When a corpulent, florid- complexioned man, well-fed and vigorous, passes sugar in his urine, only a tyro would conjecture that he was the victim of classical diabetes, a formidable wasting disease.”13 Dr. Fothergill, as it turned out, was in denial. A corpulent, florid-complexioned man himself, Fothergill died of diabetes five years later.
Today the disease has changed entirely. Even children with Type 1, insulin-deficient diabetes tend to be overweight. They are overweight before they become diabetic because of their cells’ reduced ability to metabolize fats. They are overweight after they become diabetic because the insulin that they take for the rest of their lives makes their fat cells take up lots of glucose and store it as fat.
Using positron emission tomography (PET) to scan the brain, they found that glucose uptake is considerably reduced in the region of the brain next to a cell phone.
Even more recently, researchers at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California, confirmed that electromagnetic fields cause obesity in children. They gave pregnant women meters to wear for 24 hours to measure their exposure to magnetic fields during an average day. The children of those women were more than six times as likely to be obese when they were teenagers if their mothers’ average exposure during pregnancy had exceeded 2.5 milligauss. Of course, the children were exposed to the same high fields while growing up, so what the study really proved is that magnetic fields cause obesity in chidren.21
Like diabetes, obesity has tracked exposure to electromagnetic fields. The first official statistics in the United States date from 1960, showing that one-quarter of adults were overweight. That number did not change for twenty years. The fourth survey, however, conducted during 1988–1991, revealed something alarming: fourteen million additional Americans had become fat.
The authors, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, commented that studies in Hawaii and England had found similar rises in overweight during the 1980s across the board throughout the population in both sexes and at all ages. They speculated about “dietary knowledge, attitudes, and practices, physical activity levels, and perhaps social, demographic, and health behavior factors” that might have changed, although they did not point to a single piece of evidence that any of those things had changed.23 In rebuttal, British physician Jeremiah Morris noted in a letter to the British Medical Journal that the average lifestyle had improved during this time, not worsened. More people in England were cycling, walking, swimming, and doing aerobics than ever before. Average daily food consumption, even after adjusting for meals eaten outside the home, had declined by 20 percent between 1970 and 1990.
However, in 1977, Apple had marketed its first personal computer, and during the 1980s the majority of people in both the United States and England, either at home or at work or both, were suddenly—and for the first time in history—exposed to high frequency electromagnetic fields continuously for hours everyday. The problem became so huge that in 1991 the Centers for Disease Control began retroactively tracking not just overweight but obesity. For an American man or woman of average height this is defined as being more than about 30 pounds overweight. - Kanker, het Warburg-effect en electriciteit:
But the widespread use of PET scanning for diagnosing and staging human cancers has catapulted the Warburg effect back onto the main stage of cancer research. No one can now deny that cancers live in anaerobic environments, and that they rely on anaerobic metabolism in order to grow. Even molecular biologists, who once focused exclusively on the oncogene theory, are discovering, after all, that there is a connection between lack of oxygen and cancer. A protein has been discovered that exists in all cells—hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF)—that is activated under conditions of low oxygen, and that in turn activates many of the genes necessary for cancer growth. HIF activity has been found to be elevated in colon, breast, gastric, lung, skin, esophageal, uterine, ovarian, pancreatic, prostate, renal, stomach, and brain cancers.9
A consensus is forming among cancer researchers: tumors can only develop if cellular respiration is diminished. 11 In 2009, a book dedicated to Otto Warburg was published titled “Cellular Respiration and Carcinogenesis.” Addressing all aspects of this question, it contains contributions from leading cancer researchers from the United States, Germany, France, Italy, Brazil, Japan, and Poland.12 In the foreword, Gregg Semenza wrote: “Warburg invented a device, now known as the Warburg manometer, with which he demonstrated that tumor cells consume less oxygen (and produce more lactate) than do normal cells under the same ambient oxygen concentrations. A century later, the struggle to understand how and why metastatic cancer cells manifest the Warburg effect is still ongoing, and 12 rounds of this heavyweight fight await the reader beyond this brief introduction.”
The question being asked today by cancer researchers is no longer, “Is the Warburg effect real?” but “Is hypoxia a cause, or an effect, of cancer?”13 But, as increasingly many scientists are admitting, it really doesn’t matter, and may be only a question of semantics. Since cancer cells thrive in the absence of oxygen, oxygen deprivation gives incipient cancer cells a survival advantage.14 And any environmental factor that damages respiration therefore—whether Warburg was right and it directly causes malignant transformation or whether the skeptics are right and it merely provides an environment in which cancer has an advantage over normal cells—will necessarily increase the cancer rate. Electricity, as we have seen, is such a factor. - Zon veroorzaakt geen huidkanker:
(T)heir article, “Malignant Melanoma of the Skin—Not a Sunshine Story,” they refute the notion that the tremendous increase in this disease since 1955 is caused primarily by the sun. No increase in ultraviolet radiation due to ozone depletion occurred as early as 1955. Nor, until the 1960s, did Swedes begin to travel to more southerly countries in large numbers to soak up the sun. The embarrassing truth is that rates of melanoma on the head and feet hardly rose at all between 1955 and 2008, while rates for sun-protected areas in the middle of the body increased by a factor of twenty. Most moles and melanomas are now occurring not on the head, arms, and feet, but in areas of the body that are not exposed to sunshine. - Kanker & elektriciteit, vervolg:
Elihu Richter, in Israel, has recently published a report on 47 patients, treated at Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Medicine, who developed cancer after occupational exposure to high levels of electromagnetic fields and/or radio waves.22 Many of these people—especially the youngest people—developed their cancers within a surprisingly short period of time—some as short as five or six months after the beginning of their exposure. This dispelled the notion that we must wait ten or twenty years to see the effects of cell phones on the world’s population. Richter’s team warns that “with the recent introduction of WiFi into schools, personal computers for each pupil in many schools, high frequency voltage transients measured in schools—as well as the populationwide use of cellphones, cordless phones, some exposure to cellphone towers, residential exposure to RF/MW from Smart Meters and other ‘smart’ electronic equipment at the home and possibly also ELF exposures to high power generators and transformers—young people are no longer free from exposure to EMF.” - De rol van HAARP:
Warnke believes that HAARP—the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Project—is responsible for the worldwide outbreak of Colony Collapse Disorder that began in the winter of 2006-2007.62 An “ionospheric heater” owned until recently by the United States Air Force and operated jointly with the Navy and the University of Alaska, HAARP is only the most powerful radio transmitter on earth. Capable of emitting a peak effective radiated power of four billion watts, its purpose is to set the biosphere to ringing. HAARP, whose 180 antenna towers sit on the northwest tip of Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, has turned the ionosphere itself—the life-giving layer of sky to which every creature is tuned (see chapter 9)—into a gigantic radio transmitter useful for military communications, including communication with submarines. By aiming a narrow beam of pulsating energy upwards, there near the North Pole where the aurora meets the earth, Project HAARP can force rivers of sky to broadcast radio transmissions at the frequency of the pulsations, and to send those signals to almost everywhere on earth. In 1988, when planning for HAARP was still in its early stages, physicist Richard Williams, a consultant to Princeton University’s David Sarnoff Laboratory, called the project “an irresponsible act of global vandalism.” “Look at the power levels that will be used!” he wrote in Physics and Society, the newsletter of the American Physical Society. “This is equivalent to the output of ten to 100 large power-generating stations.” In 1994, when HAARP’s first 18 antennas were about to be put into service, Williams was interviewed by Earth Island Journal. “A ten-billion-watt generator,” he said, “running continuously for one hour, would deliver a quantity of energy equal to that of a Hiroshima-sized atomic bomb.”
In March 1999, HAARP expanded to 48 antennas and an effective radiated power of almost one billion watts. The rest of its complement of 180 antennas were delivered between 2004 and 2006, enabling the facility to reach its full intended power during the winter of 2006-2007. Although the Air Force shut HAARP down in 2014 and proposed to dismantle the facility, it instead was acquired by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which reopened the facility in February 2017 and has made it available to the scientific community for research. The university is operating the facility at a loss, and it announced in 2019 that if it does not get sufficient funding, it will shut down HAARP permanently. The frequencies of HAARP, says Warnke, superimpose unnatural magnetic fields on the natural resonant frequencies of the sky, whose daily variations have not changed since life appeared on earth. This is disastrous for bees. They “lose an orientation,” he says, “that served them for millions of years as a reliable indicator of the time of day.”
