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High EMF in rear right seat?

Discussion in 'Gen 3 Prius Main Forum' started by summit123, Oct 26, 2010.

  1. RobH

    RobH Senior Member

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    EMF seems to have attracted two camps with a religious attachment to their unproven positions.

    One camp says that EMF is dangerous, particularly if there is some electronic instrument that can detect it.

    The other camp says that EMF is perfectly safe, since nobody is known to have dropped dead after 2 months exposure to it.

    My point is that EMF is potentially dangerous, and it needs to be scientifically examined for health effects. Whatever effects there are are probably quite delayed and/or confounded by other stressors. Asbestos was used for decades, and regarded as perfectly safe. Now we know that it kills after 40 years exposure. The science on EMFs from cars, cell phones, and so on hasn't been studied long enough to identify an effect similar to asbestos.

    Personally, I doubt that car EMF is a major danger. But I do think that using a Bluetooth headset is more prudent than holding a cell phone next to your head. I also think that antioxidants and nutrients like vitamin D serve as protection against the damages of radiation, both oxidizing and non-oxidizing. It's an attrition game, and EMF is just one of the potentially bad guys to be controlled.
     
  2. 2k1Toaster

    2k1Toaster Brand New Prius Batteries

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    using a bluetooth headset you are switching radiation from a 850Mhz/900Mhz/1800Mhz/1900Mhz signal (assuming standard USDM GSM carrier frequency) to a 2.4Ghz frequency.

    More accurately you are just adding an extra radiation source since your cell phone has to be within 3meters for bluetooth to work.
     
  3. bedrock8x

    bedrock8x Senior Member

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    It is not the high field strength of the static magnet that will casue damage to soft tissues, it is the 1000Watt RF pulses that pumps into your body which could cause ionization. I was one time a design engineer worked for a company in Waukesha.

     
  4. RobH

    RobH Senior Member

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    Bluetooth operates at a much lower power level than cellphone signals. So the idea of using a Bluetooth headset is to get the higher power unit away from the brain.

    As for MRI, it is certainly safer than a full body CT scan. But I think the medical profession has gone overboard on all the imaging. I had my appendix out back in the dark ages, and it was diagnosed by palpation and a white blood cell blood test. These days an MRI would be absolutely required. The diagnosis and treatment would be the same, but a whole extra army of medical types would get their piece of the action.

    But back to EMF from cars. It's probably a whole lot safer than the hydrogenated oils and fructose in modern diets. Probably even safer than the mercury in flu shots. But null effect? That remains to be researched.
     
  5. fuzzy1

    fuzzy1 Senior Member

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    You left out my camp: Researchers has been looking long and hard at this for a very long time, and while they haven't proven it safe, they also haven't detected a problem at common everyday levels. And the available database is large enough to have pushed the detection threshold down quite far, well below the level of many other hazards we already accept as 'reasonable'. Especially when compared to the risks and hazards of the prior non-electrical methods of doing things.
    Electricity has been in homes for more than a century. Exposure to high power radio transmissions has been studied frequently since at least World War II, 65+ years ago. If asbestos-like exposure problems required 40 years to become visible, we should already have plenty of evidence of it.
     
  6. teeasal

    teeasal New Member

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    OP, if you are so concerned about electric-motor powered vehicles' EMF "radiation" affecting health, be a true hero and start a petition, better still, lead a violent protest, to demand all the cosmopolitan cities in the whole world to CANCEL and BAN ALL SUBWAYS. These electrically driven underground trains TRAP millions, make it billions, of people EVERYDAY in their soup of EMF radiations of MUCH HIGHER strength than a Prius.
     
  7. jayman

    jayman Senior Member

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    :pound:

    Some of us DO have to work for a living

    Oh that is so true. Especially discussion of "electrosmog"

    Let's not forget 3-6 decades worth of dead human skin cells, and sub PM10 steel dust from the rails and wheels, being stirred up by those subways whooshing back and forth

    Yet people aren't dropping like flies. Ironically, we are living longer than ever

    Hmmmm

    I would have thought between the HAARP project up in Alaska, the "contrail" chemcial dispersant program from commercial aviation, the mind control chips that dentists implant into our teeth, the mind control rays from cell phone towers, and the mind control chemicals put into our water supply, we'd be all dropping dead at age 22

    Right after we became mindless automatons for the State

    :rolleyes:
     
  8. RobH

    RobH Senior Member

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    There are quite a number of hazards that have been accepted as 'reasonable'. When a dentist removes mercury fillings from your mouth, the mercury has to be disposed of as hazardous waste. Quite how it was safe in your mouth escapes me regardless of how long it has been used. Apparently being poisoned is accepted as normal.
    Alzheimer's is becoming epidemic, and its increase has tracked the introduction of a lot of modern technology, high frequency EMF included. ADHD is another alarming mental condition that correlates with modern electronics. Maybe EMF noise is similar in effect to acoustic noise - it doesn't kill, but it wears on you. I'd like to see studies that look at brain activity with/without various EMF. Until such studies are done, claims of absolute safety are just wishful thinking.
     
  9. teeasal

    teeasal New Member

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    No one claims absolute safety here. It's just common sense that ordinary level of electric power does not emmit enough EMF to harm people, or else the sicknesses would be detected already.

    I don't even compare the Prius with any other electric appliances but only with other electrically driven vehicles. Other than subway trains being electrically driven as I pointed out in my previous post, there're all sorts of electrically driven vehicles being used everywhere, such as fork lifts in the warehouses. Those fork lifts are pretty premitively built and no where near the sofistication of a Prius. I'd imagine that they don't shield the EMF from their electric motors very well. I have never heard warehouse fork lift operators coming down with EMF related sicknesses enmass, have you?

    How about electric wheelchairs? The Segway? Children's electric toy cars? This list can probably go on for another 10 pages!

    On the other hand, power lines EMF were known to be a health hazard, but those power lines carry enough electricity to serve millions of homes. You can't group them together with the EMF emmitted by a Prius. Power Lines EMF
     
  10. qbee42

    qbee42 My other car is a boat

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    1000 Watt RF pulses are child's play by today's standards. Many of the newer machines use 25 kW RF amplifiers, or 25 times as much power. Still, at those frequencies, RF is not ionizing. It can cause major damage from heating, but you need a lot higher energy radiation to produce ionization. Not higher power, but higher energy, as in gamma rays or x-rays. The quantity of the radiation is not what determines whether it will ionize, but instead it is the energy of each wave.

    As for static magnets, despite their static nature they can do funny things at high field levels. The problem is that you have to move the patient through the static field, and at that point it isn't static anymore. Up around the 4T level you can see white flashes when you turn your head. The induced currents probably aren't hight enough to do any damage, but still they are causing flashes, which means they are firing neurons in your body. Pretty weird stuff.

    Tom
     
  11. 3PriusMike

    3PriusMike Prius owner since 2000, Tesla M3 2018

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    Tens of millions and eventually hundreds of millions of people voluntarily agreed to do research on this starting in the 1950's. They paid to be in the test and sat for hours per day in front of a radiation producing box in their living rooms, many times actually touching the metal that received one frequency to get a better tuned signal and at other times frequently touching the box to change turn knobs.

    Children would wake up early on Saturday just to sit in front of the experimental radiation box. A few decades people wanted a more personal radiation box so that bought smaller ones with keyboards and would sit an entire day in front of them.

    I think we have 60 yrs of data.

    3PriusMike
     
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  12. bwilson4web

    bwilson4web BMW i3 and Model 3

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    Heck, starting in the 1930s, we began testing women using 1/2 hp motors spinning at thousands of rpms that also added a loud noise and screeching . . . and there were vacuum cleaners too. Hummm, before car radios, car ignitions were not designed to suppress EMI in the 1930s.

    Bob Wilson
     
  13. fuzzy1

    fuzzy1 Senior Member

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    So why are you skipping over those many known hazards and putting your energy into fighting something else whose risk is low enough that it hasn't yet popped out of the measurement noise?

    There are thousands of potential causes that track with this correlation. Focusing our attention on just one or two at a time will almost certainly cause us to miss the real causes for many generations.

    But as long as we are playing this correlation is probably causation game, I'll focus on another correlation: Alzheimer's epidemic and life expectancy, i.e. the great increase in the later over the past century is the probable cause of the former. It is very likely that we can cure this epidemic by forcing life expectancies back to the levels that prevailed in 1900.

    ADHD? A century ago, and even when I was in school, this was treated as a discipline problem and character defect, not as a disease. If we go back to the old model, I am very confident that the prevalence of this 'disease' will drop sharply.

    Who here claimed absolute safety?
     
  14. RobH

    RobH Senior Member

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    There is a seminar on "The Health Effects of Electromagnetic Fields" at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on Thursday, Nov 10.

    The full program is described at Commonwealth Club Program on Health Effects of Cell Phones, Wireless Technologies & Electromagnetic Fields With Leading Experts – Nov. 18th 11:15 – 4:30 p.m | electromagnetichealth.org

    There are a number of serious researchers who have collected evidence of danger from EMF. It's time to stop laughing, and start listening to what they have to say. I'll be at the seminar to find out what evidence they regard as important, and what I might do to cope with any dangers.

    I'll be driving my Prius to the meeting...
     
  15. Blizzard10

    Blizzard10 New Member

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    Pretty one sided group of speakers. It seems, on the surface anyway that they have an inflammatory agenda, full of their information presented as facts with no opposing or contrary information offered. Maybe I'm wrong, I do not know.

    Not being judgemental but who pays to go to these things anyway?
     
  16. Navi05

    Navi05 New Member

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    I have a Tri-Field meter which I always use to measure EMF when I move to a new apt or home. I bought this device after I noticed my son's mother had moved into nice apt. complex that was a bit too close to some high tension powerlines to convince her and myself that it wasn't a good idea for him to be near that. Here is what is bothering me at the moment:

    1. My prius has EMF levels from 60-100 milliguass on both back seats depending on speed and that was at.
    2. I've lowered EMF from the above to 15 milligauss max and about 4-5 at cruising highway speeds with a combination of galvanized sheet metal and old pc tower case covers. (Im glad I kept these old pcs around now.)
    3. Mu metal sounds great, but I will probably sell the car and miss everything else about it.
    4. Some person will mention a drunken driver being more dangerous than this issue in an attempt to downlplay it instead of using their mind to try to find a solution to a question they'd rather ignore.
     
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  17. RobH

    RobH Senior Member

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    Well, knowledge can be inflammatory. The usual story about EMF is that there isn't any real science behind the complainers.

    I expect the following speakers to address the science:
    Olle Johansson, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Head of the Experimental Dermatology Unit, Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

    Magda Havas, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Environmental & Resource Studies, Trent University

    Joel Moskowitz, Ph.D., Director, Center for Family and Community Health, School of Public Health, UC Berkeley

    Starling W. Childs, Adjunct Faculty Member, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

    Martin Blank, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Columbia University, Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics; Researcher in Biolelectromagnetics.
     
  18. Blizzard10

    Blizzard10 New Member

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    google these folks.. they all share the same opinions. All I'm saying is it appears that only one side of the "facts" will be presented.
     
  19. qbee42

    qbee42 My other car is a boat

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    The type of meter you need to do real EMF measurements at these levels costs about $10,000. Is your meter in that price range? If not, you might as well be using a divining rod.

    Tom
     
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  20. teeasal

    teeasal New Member

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    So did you find any Ghost in your Prius?:D

    Ghost Detector - Trifield Natural EMF Meter - Unique Ghost Hunting Equipment
     
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