Potential Risks to Human Health Originating from Future Sub-MM Communication Systems, Paul Ben Ishai and Yuri Feldman
presented at Expert Forum: Wireless Radiation and Human Health
Hebrew University Medical School, January 23-26 2017

Sponsored by The Israel Institute for Advanced Study and Environmental Health Trust
With Support from National Institutes of Health/ National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences and Dr. Lucy Waletzky

Important video, partial transcript starting about 20:00

And what we see shows us that there’s a change here in this layer, this is true, but there’s something happening over here and over here, which is because of the sweat duct, where it is working truly like an antenna.

We showed this to industry, Professor Feldman showed this to industry in the 2014, was it? 2015 Bio-Wireless conference. And we cannot say they were happy; that would be an understatement. And I think it’s safe to say they’ll sweep this one under the carpet as far as they possibly can.

But, what does it all mean? Experimental confirmation. Have we measured anything similar? Yeah, we have.

We used time domain terra spectrometry[?] to do this, and this is from a real person who we sent out running. And you can see basically what happens. Here he is. So we’ve sent a guy out running Before then, we’ve measured him and we’re showing the reflection coefficient normalized to what we had before he went out running. And this is directly after he comes back, this red line. So right about where we saw an effect, we see a quite strong effect here. This is a differential sequence It looks big instead of looking smaller. And it goes down until we get to about half an hour after he’s come back, and it almost goes back to the straight line of a calm person. So there’s definitely an effect.

When we compare to the actual measurement, – this is the measurement, that’s the simulation – you can see they are pretty similar.

So, it’s not just a algorithmic trick. We measured it. There’s something there, something happening. And it seems to work the way we would expect it to work, if the mechanism for absorption is in the fact the sweat duct in that skin layer.

Now we’re using very low power levels here. So we’re basically just looking at what comes back. We’re probing. We’re not influencing or anything along those lines.

So, what can it tell us? Well, the next thing you have to do, once you look through all this and noted the differences between everything, is to ask yourself: what would it be in terms of SAR? Can you then take the db absorption, change that into a temperature result, and ask what can be done?

With our great luck, it wasn’t long ago that CST brought out a SAR module for the electromagnetic software so we could use that. And we do. So, this is the picture we get. And if we just strip away layers a little bit from this one, here we go, so now we’re trying to actually cut down through the layers and see where the absorption is. Wherever you see a little bit close to the red, that’s where the high absorption is in terms of. In the stratum corneum – that will be where the sweat ducts actually terminates on the skin’s surface — it’s not particularly great. As you go down one layer more, you can see actually the absorption is concentrated in the sweat duct itself, not in the dermal layer or the epidermal layer itself.

As you go down to four, this is the mixture layer before we get to the lower epidermis, you can even make out where the sweat duct is. There’s the twist of the sweat duct in terms of the SAR level, and that simply goes down even more so until eventually there’s a dispersion along the boundary between what we make[?] the dermis and the epidermis – basically the reflection pane itself.

So definitely, the sweat duct is where the absorption is happening. And this actually tallies quite nicely with what Guy Sheperstein[?] has found way back in 2011 as well. So it’s happening there. And this is ignored by industry where they’re making the 5G recommendations. Nobody’s looking at this. Nobody’s even really aware of this.

Okay, let me push a little further for you. If you slice through so you can see the sweat duct, planar now, you can see quite clearly where the absorption is happening.

So it’s concentrated there, it’s pretty clear.

So let’s have a little bit of look at this in terms of db. It’s still very much there, it’s still quite strong. But if we now actually look at the maximum level of absorption we’re got, and this is with no duct – that’s what we should have got — and that’s with a duct. So you can see there is a specific frequency here which actually tallies quite nicely with what would be the end fire mode of an axial antenna of the same dimensions. And it tallies rather too nicely in fact. And you can see the differences is actually quite significant.

[Slide: IEEE 802.15 WPAN Specifications, working group]

Well, that’s the panel that’s making specifications for 5G. What worries me is that is basically an industry panel and it is NOT independent. And as you can see, they are making quite good progress and within two years, you said guys? two years we should have this everywhere, all over us, and this has not been looked at. Nobody’s really considering what health effects could be because of that mechanism which would prove to exist at least there. Nobody’s really considering what it can be.
[Slide; These standards do not consider SkinRad effect when assessing possible health risk issues]

And with that rather frightening message, I will leave you.

During Q&A:

…I didn’t go into the depths of the research we did do. We’ve got about 8 papers published on this.