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by surveys in Los Angeles and Great Britain. Wertheimer herself ex-
tended her observations to adults and found the same highly significant
connection between high-current wiring and various cancers, especially
leukemia.
Radar beams (composed of pulsed microwaves) have the highest power
densities of any EMR source. In the laboratory, both radio frequency and
microwave radiation have been shown to change the gateway-barrier
function of cell membranes, upset hormone balances, and induce chro-
mosome defects, all of which are factors in malignant growth. However,
there have been few attempts to directly assess radar's potential role in
human cancer.
John R. Lester and Dennis F. Moore of the University of Kansas
School of Medicine in Wichita have recently done so. Wichita was an
ideal location for such an inquiry. It had two airports with radar towers,
but few other major sources of electropollution. Its chemical environ-
ment was also quite clean as cities go. Lester and Moore plotted the
cancer incidence for the whole city and found it was highest where the
residents were exposed to both radar beams. It was lower where only one
beam penetrated, but lowest where the population was fully shielded
behind hills. The results held up when other factors, such as age, pov-
erty, sex, and race, were statistically balanced as far as possible. The
authors noted one apartment house whose cancer death rate was twice
that of the area's nursing homes; its upper floors were in direct line with
both radar beams.
Heart attack rates in North Karelia and Kuopio, Finland, became the
highest (and most swiftly increasing) in the world within a few years
after the Soviets installed a gigantic over-the-horizon radar complex that
bounced microwaves off the surface of Lake Ladoga and through these
parts of southeastern Finland. These are rural districts whose way of life
is built on outdoor labor rather than the sedentary indoor stresses gener-
ally associated with heart disease. Noting that cancer rates had also risen
precipitously in the region, Lester and Moore went on to investigate
statistics for American counties having Air Force bases. These counties
had a significantly higher percentage of cancer deaths than other coun-
ties, even though radar towers from commercial airports inevitably must
have smoothed out the data and made the difference less striking.
The study of human genetic defects from electromagnetic energy is
still in a primitive stage. In the case of microwaves, this situation is
largely due to obstruction by military and government agencies. Even in
World War II,
rumors of
radar-induced sterility were so rampant that