Thank you very much, Yuri.
It's a great honor to appear on this forum and to address colleagues both in Moldova, in Europe and all over the world. It's very important to have this kind of a discussion and to meet and look at the different data that is available in science as well as in society as a whole.
My background is from neuroscience. I had a position in basic and applied neuroscience, meaning that I know a little bit about the brain, the spinal cord and the peripheral nerves in our body and how they interact with different cell types, and help us get along in our usual lives, both day and night. And I am trained and worked my whole life at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. I also worked for a few years at the Royal Institute of Technology, also in Stockholm, Sweden. And as you probably already know, these two universities are very closely related to handing out and deciding about the Nobel Prizes in physiology, or medicine, in chemistry, and in physics. So I had the great, great honor to meet a lot of Nobel Prize winners and people that are nearly Nobel Prize winners, fantastic scientists, both men and women.
I also had a fantastic opportunity working with my supervisor for many years, and I presented my doctoral thesis regarding peptide-containing nerve cells, both in the central as well as in the peripheral nervous system. And at the Karolinska Institute, when you present your thesis, it is customary that you don't continue with the same area, but you choose something differently. And I thought one way to do that after the doctoral dissertation was to change from rats, mice, and other experimental animals into human beings, and of course, for normal, healthy volunteers. And we often used medical or dental students, and we asked them to take small biopsies, small pieces, for instance, of their skin, maybe of the oral mucosa, and from women, we could get a piece of the vaginal mucosa. But of course, people don't want to give away a piece of their brain or of their heart or the kidney. So we were very restricted. But that was fine, because we started to publish quite a number of different articles. And during my doctoral years, I had been very spoiled by being customary to publishing in journals such as Brain Research, Neuroscience, Science and Nature, journals where many people dream wet dreams about being published, but very few actually, as you know, are on. And I had the great luck to work together with a fantastic supervisor, a professor at the Karolinska Institute.
And then we were approached by clinicians from clinical dermatology, for instance, from the dental school, etc, who said, oh, we have seen your studies on normal, healthy volunteers. Would you be able to also look at skin biopsies, for instance, from psoriasis patients, from seborrheic patients, and so on, cancer patients even? And we said, yes, please, we would like to do that. So we built like a knowledge base, both on normal, healthy volunteers, as well as on patient cases.
And then one evening ― and it's so very strange, you know, sometimes you think about God's finger playing a part in your life, ― I was about to leave my laboratories, and I was alone, and someone had left a radio on, and I approached it to turn it off. Had I been a bit quicker, we would not have this conversation, Yuri. But I stopped, because I heard a lady from Göteborg on the Swedish west coast talking about the new category of electrical allergy patients, and later on, I changed the word into “screen dermatitis”. And further down the line, it was changed into the functional disability electrohypersensitivity.
But now we are in the beginning of the 1980s. And I listened to this lady, and she was asking for expertise in clinical neurology. And I'm not a neurologist, but I thought, hmm, neuroscientist, that's close enough. So I called her, and she said that she wanted to come to Stockholm from Göteborg, and she would bring a physicist, Inge Hamnerius was his name, and we sat down in my office in Stockholm, and that was really the start and the reason why we talked tonight. Because she wanted me to investigate this new type of patients, later on then turned into disability persons instead. And we draw up different projects, and we started along this line. And you should also remember that already a few years earlier, in 1977, I had read about and heard about rumors that scientists had shown effects of microwave exposure, quite scary effects actually, including leakage of the blood-brain barrier. And as a neuroscientist, I knew that that's not something you want to have. You don't want the blood-brain barrier to leak. But using microwaves, you can then open this mysterious barrier and get it to leak.
And at the same time, and this was the year 1977, it was a conference in Finland, and no one stood up and said. And wait, in a few years, Finland will get a nickname, namely Nokia Land, because Finland with Nokia Consumer Electronics will start producing and selling cell phone systems and cell phones. Of course, at the very same time, Ericsson in Sweden had grown very, very big on the same area. So we were used to constantly being bombarded by microwaves from this kind of wireless telecommunication, and it would grow worse and worse, of course.
And parallel to this, and now we move into 1980s again, scientists started to demonstrate effects. And for instance, the very first cases, they were not from Sweden when it comes to electron hypersensitivity. The first cases, they were reported in Norway and in the United States, but soon you would find them everywhere. And today, I would say you have them all over the planet. At the most remote locations. You will find people that claim that they have skin problems, skin rashes, irritations, heat sensations, heart problems, concentration problems, etc. And all of this I mentioned now has been also demonstrated on experimental animals such as rats. So when people say, “oh, you just imagine this” no, it's demonstrable also in experimental animals. And you can see the very same type of cellular and molecular reaction patterns. And from there, it grew bigger and bigger. But at the same time, I have to confess, the more scientists were able to demonstrate, the harder it got to get funding. And for us, I would say the moment, and we were the first to demonstrate that maybe people could be affected by their cell phones. And when we did that, then the doors rapidly closed. It became more or less impossible to get the necessary funding. We did our very best, but often we couldn't.
And this kind of war on mankind is not only about mankind. Don't forget that all other animals, plants, fungi and bacteria are at jeopardy too. And just quickly I could mention when it comes to effects of this kind of artificial electromagnetic fields that you use for your cell phone, your wireless laptop, your wireless baby alarm, your wireless smart meter from power lines, etc, and that you will see effects like damage to the DNA molecule that was demonstrated early by Henry Lyon and his co-workers in the United States. You have also seen, as I said before, leakage of the blood-brain barrier that has been replicated over and over and over again. And the leakage actually appears after such a short exposure time as one single minute, and at a level that is 5,000 times below what you are supposed to withstand as a human being. So very weak irradiation.
But then, of course, you have the activation of the immune system. It seems as if it tries to fight out the electromagnetic signals, but then it deteriorates and also starts to leak.
And then you have, of course, very scary observations regarding male sperm cells and fertility. And the sperm cell count, like in Europe, as you probably know, has been dramatically reduced. Not only the count, but also the motility, the normal morphology deteriorates, etc. And that has an impact, of course, on both male and female fertility. It's getting harder and harder to get new babies.
Then you have the impact on, so called pollinators, the most famous is the insect called honeybees. And honeybees and similar, they do not like this type of radiation, that's for sure. And also there, we are trying to be able to get more funding and to do replications.
Finally, I could also mention from the bacterial side, Tahirian co-workers in 2017 published a study, and many other groups have replicated it. But I'm thinking particularly about Tahirian co-workers, where they subjected the type of bacteria I and you have on us and in us right now. And they use the old-fashioned GSM or second-generation mobile telephony, and also super modern Wi-Fi routers. And to make a long story short, what they saw was that these bacteria, and recently the same has been demonstrated also for soil bacteria from the soil you use in your garden, or for agriculture, and they became antibiotic resistant.
And for instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, one health officer at the World Health Organization, he was asked if the COVID-19 pandemic is the worst threat to mankind ever. And he kind of smiled and said, no, no, no, we will be able to cope with that. That's not the problem. You don't need to be scared. But then the reporter was very smart, he asked, “well, if not that, what is then the worst threat to mankind?” And then this World Health Organization officer quickly said, oh, that's antibiotic resistance in healthcare. And it's interesting because 2017, the very same year ― and they didn't know about each other ― the G20 countries had a special meeting about the fact that then around 25,000 Europeans die prematurely, because antibiotics don't function in healthcare. They have antibiotic resistant bacteria in their body. And it was said that by 2050, it could be in the order of 10 million people worldwide.
But of course, if you allow Tahiri and the G20 countries to meet and merge, then this 10 million could be 8.2 billion people, because without functioning antibiotics, then people will again, like people did at the end of the 19th century, die from a splinter in their thumb. So that would be a catastrophe, really. And I do hope, and I know I'm often referring to myself as a mental fire brigade soldier, and I do hope I am completely wrong. But so far, nothing points to that we are. And I tried to write, for instance, to my previous prime minister, and he wasn't interested at all, neither was his collaborating minister.
So I hope that you are more successful in other countries. And we have written to the United Nations. We have written to the World Health Organization and so on. And so far, we have not received anything back. So hopefully they know something we don't know. And they know it's all safe. Because when you go to your store and buy a cell phone, It is sold to you under the headline, it's good, it's safe.
But you should remember that there is not a single insurance or reinsurance company in the world that takes any form of responsibility or liability for health effects of artificial electromagnetic fields. Actually, they include even natural fields in their exceptions. So they understand, and this is not new. They already in 2002 in London declared that for them, it was not the question whether it was dangerous or not with the cell phone radiation. They knew it was dangerous. The question was only who is going to pay in the future when people will demand compensation because they have got a brain tumor or a leakage of the blood-brain barrier or not being able to get any babies.
Thank you.
