It’s hotting up and likely to get worse is the forecast! Well, that’s said as a joke. But it is true that scientific interest in the Sun as a health hazard is hotting up.
In my 1999 book Virtual Medicine I devoted a whole chapter to the fact that we are living in an intense electro-magnetic environment. In scale, it makes the levels of cell phone radiation we worry about so much seem like a wet firecracker to a hydrogen bomb.
There is a plasma layer up there in the sky that is hotted up to many millions of volts. Solar storms intensify this plasma layer. We are, in effect living in the center of an active dynamo: as the Earth turns, its massive iron core rotates in this intense electromagnetic field.
It’s a wonder we are not fried in mere seconds. Indeed, we would be, except for certain in-built protections, like the ozone layer and the Van Allen belts, which shield us from the most violent solar storms.
But once in a while, even the protective layers fail and when the Sun gets pissy and spits out (a so-called coronal mass ejection or CME), it can literally fry electrical equipment here at the surface.
In 1859 the Earth at night lit up like a Christmas tree, and people ran out on to the sidewalk to watch the sky glow. Some individuals were so confused they got dressed and set off for work, thinking it was morning! The “Carrington Event,” as it was known, came after the sun unleashed a large coronal mass ejection, a burst of charged plasma aimed directly at the Earth.
When the particles hit our magnetosphere, they triggered an especially fierce geomagnetic storm that lit up the sky and frazzled communication wires around the world.
Telegraphs in Philadelphia were spitting out “fantastical and unreadable messages,” one paper reported, with some systems unusable for hours.
Does It Affect Humans?
You might think this is an obvious question, but it’s been a long time in coming, the recognition that all this energy activity might just have some effect on human life! Scientists scoffed at the notion and lumped such an idea along with astrology as nonsense. Indeed, many still do.
However Russian scientist Alexander Chizhevsky suggested in 1915 that solar storms directly cause conflict, wars and even death among humans on Earth. His work was continued by Professor Raymond Wheeler of the University of Kansas.
In the 1930’s Wheeler began a lifetime study that analyzed world climate and cultural activities back to the dawn of recorded civilization. He presented his research in his book, Climate: The Key To Understanding Business Cycles.
There is no doubt according to Wheeler that weather does affect us.
Scientific Studies
Pretending there is nothing happening is an untenable dinosaur position today. There are many studies showing that human health risk of solar energy are greatly impacted by Solar events.
The first real study which startled the world was in 1961 (Becker et al), later followed by similar results published by Friedman et al (1963). They found a clear link between a rise in mental hospital admissions and geo-Solar magnetic activity.
This was no fluke and repeated again in 1994, when R.W. Kay published a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry, linking hospital admissions due to depression with days of geomagnetic activity.
The researcher found a “36.2% increase in male hospital admissions with a diagnosis of depressed phase, manic-depressive illness in the second week following such storms compared with geomagnetically quiet control periods.”
That’s up by a third!1
Heliobiology
They are now calling it “heliobiology”, from helios, the Greek for Sun. Obvious effects include mental status (mood), heart attacks, strokes and migraines.
In a 2012 study, electrocardiograms of functionally healthy persons, who were digitally registered at the Laboratory of Heliobiology located in the Medical Centre INAM (Baku, Azerbaijan), were studied in relation to different levels of cosmic ray activity and geomagnetic field disturbances.
In total, 1,673 daily digital data of heart rate values and time series of beat-to-beat heart rate intervals were registered for the time period July 15, 2006–March 31, 2008, which includes the period of December 2006, when intense cosmic ray events and strong geomagnetic disturbances occurred.
Results revealed that heart rate increased in proportion to the rise of geomagnetic activity but that large cosmic ray intensity decreases were also a trigger factor, to which the heart responds.
Moreover, heart rate increased on the days before, during and after geomagnetic storms with high intensities and on the days preceding, and following cosmic ray intensity decreases.2
Heart Affected
At least three studies correlate a strong link between the occurrence of geomagnetic storms and heart attacks (myocardial infarctions). It appears that strong magnetic pulses from geomagnetic storms interfere with the electric impulses that stimulate the heart muscle to contract.
According to these studies, the number of hospitalizations due to heart attacks peak during storm activities. In one study, the number more than doubled, and in another study, the number of fatal heart attacks increased by 70%.
Researchers also noticed a very significant rise in hospital admissions for strokes, correlated with Solar activity (130% rise).3,4,5
Headaches
Headaches and migraines also rise significantly when there is a Solar “storm” blowing.
That fits very well with the known effects down here of a high concentration of positively charged particles, blown in by winds such as the Santa Ana winds (Los Angeles), The Khamsin (Middle East), The Mistral (France) and the Chinook (North American prairies).
People sometimes go completely crazy; headache and feeling lousy is commonplace.
Researchers studied the relationship between the migraine triggers of 40 patients and meteorological elements such as humidity, temperature and geomagnetic activity. They recorded the meteorological data and frequency changes of geomagnetic activity and compared them with the onset and severity of the migraine attacks.
The researchers concluded: “Our results indicate a significant correlation between geomagnetic activity and migraine attack frequency.” 6
According to other researchers, the onset of a headache did not correlate fully with GMA [Geomagnetic Activity] but the intensity of the headache however was linearly correlated, increasing from 25.9% of severe headaches in days with quiet GMA to 43.75% of severe headaches in days with stormy GMA.7
Blood Changes
Maki Takata of Toho University, Japan, made studies of changes in blood serum during the solar eclipses of 1941, 1943 and 1948; he found significant changes.
In Russia, over 120,000 tests were made on people in a Black Sea resort, measuring lymphocytes—vital participants in the immune system. There was a big drop in the sunspot years of 1956 and 1957.
Lung hemorrhages in TB patients are also affected.
Studies of traffic accidents in Germany and in Russia show increases of up to four times the normal level, on the days after a solar flare.8
Why Should We Be Vulnerable?
The point is that we are an electrical composite: not only is the nervous system entirely electrical in nature but out connective tissue is also a piezo-pulsed electrical (fires off under pressure).
Moreover, we are an energy body, not a biochemical soup. When electricity is no longer found in the body, it’s a corpse! Electricity is life, not all that biochemical stuff.
Buried in this electrical “being” is a ton of information, possibly containing all the genetic line, past lives, morphogenic fields and a host of other information fields. Remember my saying (from Cyril Smith of Salford University): “Advanced physics doesn’t just say these things can happen; it says they must happen.”
I remind you also of my popular piece “The Birth Of Cosmic Medicine”, putting DNA right in the center of the Cosmic Web!
It would be a miracle indeed if our vast neighbor in space didn’t affect us and even hurt us from time to time.
References:
1. RW Kay, Geomagnetic storms: association with incidence of depression as measured by hospital admission. The British Journal of Psychiatry 164: 403-409 (1994).
2. Natural Hazards, November 2012, Volume 64, Issue 2, pp 1447-1459. Space weather hazards and their impact on human cardio-health state parameters on Earth. H. Mavromichalaki, M. Papailiou, S. Dimitrova, E. S. Babayev, P. Loucas
3. Stoupel E., Effect of geomagnetic activity on cardiovascular parameters, Journal of Clinical and Basic Cardiology 1999; 2 (Issue 1), 34-40
4. Kuleshova, V.P., S.A. Pulinets, E.S. Sazanova, A.M. Kharchenko (1998). Biotropic effects of geomagnetic storms and their seasonal variations, Biofizika, Vol. 46, Issue 5, September – October 2001, pp. 930-934.
5. Taboada, R.E.R., P.S. Figueredo and S.S. Figueredo (2004), Geomagnetic activity related to acute myocardial infarctions: Relationship in a reduced population and time interval, Geofisica International, Vol. 43, No. 2, 2004, pp. 265-269.
6. G. De Matteis, M Vellante, A Marrelli, U Villante, P Santalucia, P Tuzi, M Prencipe (1994). Geomagnetic Activity, Humidity, Temperature and Headache: Is, There Any Correlation? Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain 34 (1), 41–43.
7. A Kuritzky M.D, Y Zoldan M.D, R Hering M.D, E Stoupel M.D., Ph.D (1987). Geomagnetic Activity and the Severity of the Migraine Attack.
8. Lyall Watson, Supernature, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1973, pp. 51- 53