Örjan Hallberg, Copyright Hallberg Independent Research, 2008. http://hir.nu 2008-03-07
There is no doubt that sick registering suddenly started to increase from winter 1997. The same is found for each county as well. Earlier the registered numbers of sick-leave had been decreasing for years and all of the sudden the numbers started to increase! Figure 1 shows the total numbers of sick registered in Sweden and Figure 2 gives as an example the same for the Stockholm county.
Figure 1. The number of sick registered in Sweden suddenly started to increase at the end of 1997.
Figur 2. The number of sick-registered in Stockholm county.
The following table gives similar dataq for all counties.
| County | Population | Trend-break month | Increase 97-02 | Increase % |
| Blekinge | 149544 | Oktober -97 | 2500 | 1,7% |
| Kronoberg | 178961 | Oktober -97 | 3000 | 1,7% |
| Dalarna | 290245 | November -97 | 6000 | 2,1% |
| Gävleborg | 289300 | December -97 | 6500 | 2,2% |
| Halland | 254725 | December -97 | 4500 | 1,8% |
| Jönköping | 309738 | December -97 | 6000 | 1,9% |
| Kalmar | 241883 | December -97 | 5000 | 2,1% |
| Skåne | 1086689 | December -97 | 18000 | 1,7% |
| Stockholm | 1686230 | December -97 | 35000 | 2,1% |
| Uppsala | 286642 | December -97 | 7000 | 2,4% |
| Värmland | 285498 | December -97 | 6000 | 2,1% |
| Västernorrland | 260295 | December -97 | 6000 | 2,3% |
| Västmanland | 261753 | December -97 | 4500 | 1,7% |
| Västra Götaland | 1468988 | December -97 | 27000 | 1,8% |
| Örebro | 276828 | December -97 | 5500 | 2,0% |
| Östergötland | 415603 | December -97 | 8000 | 1,9% |
| Gotland | 57108 | Januari -98 | 1000 | 1,8% |
| Jämtland | 136000 | Januari -98 | 3000 | 2,2% |
| Norrbotten | 267000 | Januari -98 | 6500 | 2,4% |
| Södermanland | 259793 | Januari -98 | 4500 | 1,7% |
| Västerbotten | 199500 | Januari -98 | 6000 | 3,0% |
Table I. The number of sick registered per month are given as individual graphs.
Figure 3 shows roughly how the fraction of the population that has an increasing rate of sick registered goes from 0% to 100% in less than half a year.
Figure 3. The graph gives tha percentage of the population showing increasing sickness rates.
The authorities do not give any technical reasons to why the sick numbers started to race from the end of 1997 onwards. In April 1998 a change in social security routines was introduced but that can not explain the sudden increase several months earlier. Thus, we need to look for technical changes that happende at or before the time points given in Figure 3. These changes need to be of national character since all counties were affected. Since beginning of 1980's a number of country covering mobile systems have been rolled-out in Sweden. First we got the NMT450 system, operating at 450 MHz from about 1984 onwards. In 1992 a new system, GSM900 was approved and the roll-out started from about 1993. This system, working at 900 MHz became quite popular and needed to be complemented by more channels, avaliable through GSM1800, working at 1,8GHz, a truely microwave system.
GSM1800 was mainly needed in city regions and densely populated areas and required that thousands of small base stations were distributed close to buildings and private homes.In teh summer 1997 the authority (PTS) gave permission to put up such base stations anywhere without any bureaucracy.
The first operator was Telia and the roll-out took place successively all over the country. Already before Telia had had the best coverage from NMT and GSM900 and should also be the best in GSM1800. Other operators started their roll-out not until later, quite a bit into 1998.
The question was sent to TeliaSonera from where the answer came:
"Why do you need these data, for what purpose? Who are you, who is asking?"
I explained who I am and why I needed those data. The answer was then:
"The questions that deal with EMF may I ask you to address our responsible within Telia, Lars-Eric Larsson."
After addressing Lars-Erik Larsson I got the following negative answer:
"I remember we have discussed this question before and that we also by then announced that the data you required will not be released. The cause is that these dates reasonably can not have any association with the levels of sick registration in Sweden in 1997. These levels fluctiate over time and geography but our base stations are established permanently and a started base station is not closed down over time. The roll-out of the GSM1800 MHz mobile network is also not done in a manner that we swithc on a large number of base stations at the same point in time but they are added to the current network as a densifying between already available base stations in order to increase the capacity of the net. This densifying is related to how the traffic in the network is increasing and it is impossible to define a specific month for a specific county as when they got GSM1800 base stations up and running. As GSM1800 MHz base stations are used for increasing the network capacity and not to increase the coverage they are mainly used in cities and not in th e country-side.
TheliaSonera does not have any otheropinion on healthrisks from Base stations than what is expressed by SSI, Socialstyrelsen and WHO, all of which are of the opinion that they have no impact on health. Enclosed are documents related to this question."
I mailed a question to PTS in order to get their view about what public radio net that might have been rolled-out just before or during the time period given by Table 1. The answer from PTS was very concrete and clear: Svaret från PTS
"PTS does not have a register that gives time information regarding roll-out of mobile systems in different counties. However, if you look at when the general approvals were given and the networks subsequently were taken into commission you can see the following. (http://www.pts.se/Sidor/sida.asp?SectionId=1001) The GSM networks were opened in 1992 and 3G was granted from 2001. The mobile system that might be close to your time-line is GSM1800, this newwork was brougnt into commission 1997 and onwards. We have, as said, no register that gives temporal and geographical information about this roll-out, so it is difficult to verify if the roll-out is matching the points in time described by the table. Regardsing digital TV the Swedish Gouvernment decided about admission of digital broadcasting from June 1988. Regular broadcasting started in April 1999 in limited geographical areas. Hope this is at any help. With kind regards, Jan Boström"
This question has already been asked and an answer was given by PTT. See: http://hir.nu/1800/Answers.htm The health aspect was never addressed and SSI was never asked about it before the roll-out.
In a report from Socialstyrelsen, 2006 the following is said about increasing sickness rates:
"The development has caused Sweden to have the highest ratio of sick registered among the work force in Europe. A large number of attempts to answer the question what this depends on have been made. A general conclusion is that demographic factors, labour market factors and differences in social security factors do not explain the high sick-leave rate in Sweden. In search for other explanations e.g. modern Swedish psychosocial work environment characterized by high change pressure, low tolerance to differences in working capacity and lacking control over the own wort situation have been mentioned. Defficiencies in the social security administration have also been mentioned several times."
From what is said it is clear that Socialstyrelsen does not have a clue of what really has been causing the sudden increase in sick-leave registration in Sweden since 1997.
It remains to be seen if it is leagally correct to hide such information for the public since it is the public that is hit by possible health problems due to decisions made. Enormeous investments have been made in mobile system infrastructure and any connection between unhealth and mobile phone systems may constitute a dangerous threat to the industry.
But according to a note from Socialstyrelsen (Nr 5/2002) regarding base stations and the environmental law the following is stated: "When people are worried about the health influence from base stations, the operator ought to give information about the radiation emmitted from the station". My question to TeliaSonera was not as detailed to include the level of radiation, just an estimate of from when the radiation was permanently switched on in each county. According to Socialstyrelsen such a question should be properly answered and not classified.
During the years I have written a number of papers dealing with various connections between adverse health and mobile phone radiation. Ref. [1] was a presentation given at Kos, Greeece in 2004. A ppt file is available for interested parties. Ref [2] was published by the Australian Journal ACNEM and pointed at the fast increasing illness in Sweden from when GSM1800 was introduced. In ref. [3] was described how certain diseases seemed to be related to the average output power from mobile phones. In sparsely populated areas the handsets need to shour louder in order for the base station to hear properly, menaing that it is more dangerous to speak in a mobile phone in the country side than in a city. Ref. [4] gave a summary picture of the degraded health situation in Sweden after 1997. Ref. [5] pointed at the fact that hearing problems and acoustic neuroma (tumors) increased much more in the country side as compared with the city regions in Sweden. Again pointing at the danger of high power output from the mobile phones. Ref. [6] shows that also Alzheimer's mortality in increasing most in sparsely populated areas. Ref. [7] is a summary of a presentation that I gave in Belgium on the 1997-theam. This presentation also made the basic ground for an article (Ref. [8]) that later on was published by EJCP. Many manuscripts never become published or are even not considered for publication. In a small booklet 5 such manuscripts have been put together so that they finally might be red by interested people. In this case the Karolinska Institute supported the printing costs, Ref. [9].
There is no doubt that the level of electro sensitive people is increasing in many countries. After reviewing many reports on the subject I made a short summary paper together with Prof G Oberfeldt. The summary statistics points in a scaring direction: in year 2017 may-be 50% of us are not fully comfortable with electromagnetic radioation of one or another form! Ref. [10]. Also house sparrows avoid strong electromagnetic fields. This became quite clear after the analysis of 1200 measurements of bird density and field strength during 4 years done by Prof A Balmori Ref. [11] We doubt that the results are due to psychosomatic factors which Socialstyrelsen states being the reason behind human avoidance of electric fields... Finally, ref. [12] again shows that the rate of brain tumours are increasing faster in areas where the mobile phones are using higher output power. Just a conicidence...?
