Microwave Oven: Blessing or a curse?

How unsuspecting people continue to microwave their food not knowing that radiation from the gadget poses danger to their health, writes Dr Kizito Lubano

The hazards of microwave technology were known well before money poured in from the kitchen appliances, computers and cell phones, which all emit dangerous radiation.

In an article published in Health Science magazine, the Nazis, for use in their mobile support operations, originally developed microwave “radiomissor” cooking ovens to be used for the invasion of Russia.

By utilising electronic equipment for preparation of meals on a mass scale, the logistical problem of cooking fuels would have been eliminated, as well as the convenience of producing edible products in a greatly reduced time-factor.

Several years later, scientists reported the harmful effects of microwave radiation and set up strict environmental limits for their usage.

In Kenya today, it’s getting almost impossible to die from natural causes. Coronary diseases and heart attacks are the most common causes of death in the industrialised world, with cancer coming in a close second.

Experts estimate that over 70 per cent of Kenyan homes have microwave gadgets. However, the electronic manufacturers continue to suppress important evidence on the health risks of using microwave gadgets.

A hundred years ago, the incidence of cancer was one in five hundred; while today it is practically one in two. Breast cancer has become the most common cause of death in women aged 35 to 54. Back in 1971, the risk of breast cancer for women was one in 14. Today, the risk is closer to one in eight.

A known hazard for years

Today, young people can hardly imagine that human society once functioned without cellular phones, and actually quite well. No one died from overwork either, because cooking everyday, without microwave ovens, required more time.

This makes the microwave oven used in today’s kitchen seem truly ‘modern,’ even though the technology is almost 70 years old. The health risks, too, have been known for just as long.

It was the Germans who during the 1930’s, first developed microwave technology. By the time the Second World War broke out, German scientists had already developed a radar system based on technically generated microwaves, in order to detect British bombers in advance of a raid. In the midst of bitter cold wintertime, the soldiers used gather around the radar screen to get warm - and wound up getting sick.

They developed cancer, which initially manifested as leukemia, or cancer of the blood. Upon learning this, the Supreme Command of the ‘Wehrmacht’ immediately responded by issuing a general order to abandon the use of radar.

Because it was apparent that human-engineered microwaves heat tissue, Humboldt University in Berlin was given a grant in the early ‘40s to develop microwave ovens. The objective was to provide German soldiers with a warm meal that could be prepared both fast and with no fuel, for use during the Barbarossa Campaign against the Soviet Union. However, anyone who consumed this microwaved food likewise developed cancerous blood, just like the radar technicians.

Obviously, the immune system underwent a severe stress reaction to this type of food. The use of microwave ovens was subsequently forbidden in the entire Third Reich.

After the war, East Berlin and Humboldt University fell within the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. The Russians seized the university archives and with that, the medical files and research documents on experimental microwave ovens.

After 1957, the research, which the Germans had started was continued by Russians at the Institute for Radio Technology in Kinsk (in what is today Belarus), among other places. In the end, the Soviet Union promulgated a state law in 1976 banning the use of microwave ovens, and it published an international statement of warning.

The prohibition was lifted during the period of Perestroika, although today, the threshold levels of acceptable exposure used by the Russian telecommunications industry are still several thousand times less than in the USA, and at least one thousand times less as those levels in West Europe.

New evidence

In1989, two Swiss researchers decided to investigate the hazards of microwave ovens, without having any prior knowledge that the German and Russian studies even existed. Prof Bernard Blanc of the University of Lausanne, and an independent researcher, Dr Hans Hertel, found that: “Food, heated by microwaves, causes pathogenic changes in the blood of individuals who consume such food, similar to what is seen in the initial stages of cancer.”

How microwave ovens work

Microwaves are a form of electro-magnetic energy, like light waves, and occupy a part of the electro-magnetic spectrum of power. Microwaves are very short waves of electro-magnetic energy that travel at the speed of light (186,282 miles per second).

In modern technology, microwaves are used to relay long distance telephone signals, television programmes, and computer information across the earth or to a satellite in space. But the microwave is most familiar to us as an energy source for cooking food.

Every microwave oven contains a magnetron, a tube in which electrons are affected by magnetic and electric fields in such a way as to produce micro wavelength radiation at about 2450 Mega Hertz (MHz) or 2.45 Giga Hertz (GHz). This microwave radiation interacts with the molecules in food. All wave energy changes polarity from positive to negative with each cycle of the wave.

In microwaves, these polarity changes happen millions of times every second. Food molecules, especially the molecules of water, have a positive and negative end in the same way a magnet has a north and a south polarity.