Dr. Murat Berksoy

Brain expert warns of huge rise in tumours and calls on industry to take immediate steps to reduce radiation.

Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. He says people should avoid using them wherever possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take “immediate steps” to reduce exposure to their radiation.

The study, by Dr Vini Khurana, is the most devastating indictment yet published of the health risks.

It draws on growing evidence – exclusively reported in the IoS in October – that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long.

Earlier this year, the French government warned against the use of mobile phones, especially by children. Germany also advises its people to minimise handset use, and the European Environment Agency has called for exposures to be reduced.

Professor Khurana – a top neurosurgeon who has received 14 awards over the past 16 years, has published more than three dozen scientific papers – reviewed more than 100 studies on the effects of mobile phones. He has put the results on a brain surgery website, and a paper based on the research is currently being peer-reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.

He admits that mobiles can save lives in emergencies, but concludes that “there is a significant and increasing body of evidence for a link between mobile phone usage and certain brain tumours”. He believes this will be “definitively proven” in the next decade.

Noting that malignant brain tumours represent “a life-ending diagnosis”, he adds: “We are currently experiencing a reactively unchecked and dangerous situation.” He fears that “unless the industry and governments take immediate and decisive steps”, the incidence of malignant brain tumours and associated death rate will be observed to rise globally within a decade from now, by which time it may be far too late to intervene medically.

“It is anticipated that this danger has far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking,” says Professor Khurana, who told the IoS his assessment is partly based on the fact that three billion people now use the phones worldwide, three times as many as smoke. Smoking kills some five million worldwide each year, and exposure to asbestos is responsible for as many deaths in Britain as road accidents.

Late last week, the Mobile Operators Association dismissed Khurana’s study as “a selective discussion of scientific literature by one individual”. It believes he “does not present a balanced analysis” of the published science, and “reaches opposite conclusions to the WHO and more than 30 other independent expert scientific reviews”.

Evolution is being distorted by pollution, which damages genitals and the ability to father offspring, says new study.

The male gender is in danger, with incalculable consequences for both humans and wildlife, startling scientific research from around the world reveals.

The research – to be detailed tomorrow in the most comprehensive report yet published – shows that a host of common chemicals is feminising males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people.

Backed by some of the world’s leading scientists, who say that it “waves a red flag” for humanity and shows that evolution itself is being disrupted, the report comes out at a particularly sensitive time for ministers. On Wednesday, Britain will lead opposition to proposed new European controls on pesticides, many of which have been found to have “gender-bending” effects.

It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminised genitals.

“This research shows that the basic male tool kit is under threat,” says Gwynne Lyons, a former government adviser on the health effects of chemicals, who wrote the report.

Wildlife and people have been exposed to more than 100,000 new chemicals in recent years, and the European Commission has admitted that 99 per cent of them are not adequately regulated. There is not even proper safety information on 85 per cent of them.

Many have been identified as “endocrine disrupters” – or gender-benders – because they interfere with hormones. These include phthalates, used in food wrapping, cosmetics and baby powders among other applications; flame retardants in furniture and electrical goods; PCBs, a now banned group of substances still widespread in food and the environment; and many pesticides.

The report – published by the charity CHEMTrust and drawing on more than 250 scientific studies from around the world – concentrates mainly on wildlife, identifying effects in species ranging from the polar bears of the Arctic to the eland of the South African plains, and from whales in the depths of the oceans to high-flying falcons and eagles.

It concludes: “Males of species from each of the main classes of vertebrate animals (including bony fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) have been affected by chemicals in the environment.

“Feminisation of the males of numerous vertebrate species is now a widespread occurrence. All vertebrates have similar sex hormone receptors, which have been conserved in evolution. Therefore, observations in one species may serve to highlight pollution issues of concern for other vertebrates, including humans.”

Fish, it says, are particularly affected by pollutants as they are immersed in them when they swim in contaminated water, taking them in not just in their food but through their gills and skin. They were among the first to show widespread gender-bending effects.

Half the male fish in British lowland rivers have been found to be developing eggs in their testes; in some stretches all male roaches have been found to be changing sex in this way. Female hormones – largely from the contraceptive pills which pass unaltered through sewage treatment – are partly responsible, while more than three-quarters of sewage works have been found also to be discharging demasculinising man-made chemicals. Feminising effects have now been discovered in a host of freshwater fish species as far away as Japan and Benin, in Africa, and in sea fish in the North Sea, the Mediterranean, Osaka Bay in Japan and Puget Sound on the US west coast.

Research at the University of Florida earlier this year found that 40 per cent of the male cane toads – a species so indestructible that it has become a plague in Australia – had become hermaphrodites in a heavily farmed part of the state, with another 20 per cent undergoing lesser feminisation. A similar link between farming and sex changes in northern leopard frogs has been revealed by Canadian research, adding to suspicions that pesticides may be to blame.

Male alligators exposed to pesticides in Florida have suffered from lower testosterone and higher oestrogen levels, abnormal testes, smaller penises and reproductive failures. Male snapping turtles have been found with female characteristics in the same state and around the Great Lakes, where wildlife has been found to be contaminated with more than 400 different chemicals. Male herring gulls and peregrine falcons have produced the female protein used to make egg yolks, while bald eagles have had difficulty reproducing in areas highly contaminated with chemicals.

Scientists at Cardiff University have found that the brains of male starlings who ate worms contaminated by female hormones at a sewage works in south-west England were subtly changed so that they sang at greater length and with increased virtuosity.

Even more ominously for humanity, mammals have also been found to be widely affected.

Two-thirds of male Sitka black-tailed deer in Alaska have been found to have undescended testes and deformed antler growth, and roughly the same proportion of white-tailed deer in Montana were discovered to have genital abnormalities.

In South Africa, eland have been revealed to have damaged testicles while being contaminated by high levels of gender-bender chemicals, and striped mice from one polluted nature reserved were discovered to be producing no sperm at all.

At the other end of the world, hermaphrodite polar bears – with penises and vaginas – have been discovered and gender-benders have been found to reduce sperm counts and penis lengths in those that remained male. Many of the small, endangered populations of Florida panthers have been found to have abnormal sperm.

Other research has revealed otters from polluted areas with smaller testicles and mink exposed to PCBs with shorter penises. Beluga whales in Canada’s St Lawrence estuary and killer whales off its north-west coast – two of the wildlife populations most contaminated by PCBs – are reproducing poorly, as are exposed porpoises, seals and dolphins.

Scientists warned yesterday that the mass of evidence added up to a grave warning for both wildlife and humans. Professor Charles Tyler, an expert on endocrine disrupters at the University of Exeter, says that the evidence in the report “set off alarm bells”. Whole wildlife populations could be at risk, he said, because their gene pool would be reduced, making them less able to withstand disease and putting them at risk from hazards such as global warming.

Dr Pete Myers, chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences, one of the world’s foremost authorities on gender-bender chemicals, added: “We have thrown 100, 000 chemicals against a finely balanced hormone system, so it’s not surprising that we are seeing some serious results. It is leading to the most rapid pace of evolution in the history of the world.

Professor Lou Gillette of Florida University, one of the most respected academics in the field, warned that the report waved “a large red flag” at humanity. He said: “If we are seeing problems in wildlife, we can be concerned that something similar is happening to a proportion of human males”

Indeed, new research at the University of Rochester in New York state shows that boys born to mothers with raised levels of phthalates were more likely to have smaller penises and undescended testicles. They also had a shorter distance between their anus and genitalia, a classic sign of feminisation. And a study at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University showed that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys.

Communities heavily polluted with gender-benders in Canada, Russia and Italy have given birth to twice as many girls than boys, which may offer a clue to the reason for a mysterious shift in sex ratios worldwide. Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls, but the ratio is slipping. It is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born as girls instead in the US and Japan alone.

And sperm counts are dropping precipitously. Studies in more than 20 countries have shown that they have dropped from 150 million per millilitre of sperm fluid to 60 million over 50 years. (Hamsters produce nearly three times as much, at 160 million.) Professor Nil Basu of Michigan University says that this adds up to “pretty compelling evidence for effects in humans”.

But Britain has long sought to water down EU attempts to control gender-bender chemicals and has been leading opposition to a new regulation that would ban pesticides shown to have endocrine-disrupting effects. Almost all the other European countries back it, but ministers – backed by their counterparts from Ireland and Romania – are intent on continuing their resistance at a crucial meeting on Wednesday. They say the regulation would cause a collapse of agriculture in the UK, but environmentalists retort that this is nonsense because the regulation has get-out clauses that could be used by British farmers.

A modern “chemical revolution” that began in earnest in the last half of the twentieth
century has released thousands of man-made synthetic compounds into the environment.
To date some 80,000 have been registered for use in the United States, including
components of products ranging from pesticides to plastics, from detergents to cosmetics.
Today, many of these synthetic compounds—never part of the environment our
ancestors lived and evolved in—can be measured in drinking water, soils, foods, the air,
and even in our own bodies. And yet, in contrast to regulation imposed on pharmaceutical
manufacturers, there is no requirement that chemical industry manufacturers test
their products (other than new kinds of pesticides and some food additives) for effects
on human health before commercial introduction. It falls to federal and state agencies
to do this testing after products are already on the market and in the environment, and
then only if specific concern about the health risks of a chemical is raised. The result is
that more than 85 percent of the 80,000 synthetic chemicals registered have never been
assessed for their effects on human health.

Many of these compounds may be harmless, but a significant number of those that
have been tested are now known to be reproductive toxicants. What especially concerns
environmentalists, health groups, and reproductive specialists is that in some notorious
cases, the very features that make synthetic compounds attractive to modern industry
also make them particularly difficult environmental problems. Consider polychlorinated
biphenyls (PCBs), which were used for decades in a wide range of products
(including electrical transformers, adhesives, and paints) particularly because they tend
to be chemically stable, or persistent. Although banned in the late 1970s because of
suspected links to cancer, PCBs persist in lake and river sediments and elsewhere in
the environment, and continue to work their way into and concentrate up food chains
in ecosystems. This means PCBs end up in people, where they also persist, or bioaccumulate,
because they tend to bind to fatty tissue and aren’t easily broken down.
Other examples of notably persistent contaminants include the pesticide DDT; a class
of industrial byproducts called dioxins; certain flame retardants; and perfluorinated
compounds, which are used to create nonstick cookware coatings and in fabrics and
carpets for their stain and water-resistant qualities.

FETAL ORIGINS OF ADULT DISEASE—THE DES EXAMPLE

Hormones also play vitally important roles during fetal development, orchestrating in
intricate detail aspects of development ranging from the formation of the sex organs to
the structure of the brain. A key idea proposed by scientists working with endocrine
disruptors is that some of these compounds can do their most serious damage during the
critical months that a fetus is in the womb.

The human experience with a compound called diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic
estrogen, provides important clues about how this might work. Over a period of more
than 30 years beginning in the late 1930s, DES was administered to more than five million
pregnant women, and perhaps as many as 10 million. Doctors believed the synthetic
estrogen would help prevent miscarriages and premature births.

That assumption proved to be wrong. Still, the drug at least seemed safe (for humans,
anyway; rodent studies had shown it to be carcinogenic as early as the 1930s).
Through years of prescribed use, mothers who took the artificial hormone
showed no serious health effects. But in 1971, scientists came to
a stunning conclusion: although there still was no evidence of health
problems in the exposed mothers, a significant number of their daughters
were experiencing reproductive health problems. Those maladies
usually appeared only after the daughters were well into their own
child-bearing years, long after they had been exposed to the substance
in the womb.

Symptoms among DES daughters included a higher risk of an
otherwise exceedingly rare vaginal and cervical cancer called clear
cell adenocarcinoma, as well as abnormalities of the uterus and other
parts of the reproductive tract. DES daughters also clearly suffer from
an unusually high rate of infertility problems— at least double that in
the unexposed population. Additionally, DES daughters suffer more
ectopic (tubal) pregnancies, which occur when a fertilized egg lodges in the fallopian
tube instead of the uterus. And when DES daughters do conceive, 40 percent or more
are unable to achieve a full-term live birth. Laboratory scientists have observed many of
these kinds of results in mice they have exposed to DES experimentally.

ENVIRONMENT, DISEASE, AND GENES: NEW CLUES, AND SHOCKWAVES

As noted above, some contaminants interfere with signaling by acting like hormones
themselves, for example, binding with the hormone receptor and thereby stimulating
genes that respond to that hormone. But newly developing science is revealing yet another
mechanism of impact, another layer of the system that controls how genes behave.
This newer evidence suggests that even when a specific gene is present, and even when
the proper hormone signal is being sent, certain chemicals can actually act like a protective
screen, preventing the hormone from reaching the switch that normally turns a gene
on. The gene may be there, but because the signal can’t get to its switch, the gene remains
in the switched-off state and therefore it can’t produce the proteins that would normally
catalyze a given response in a cell.

One mechanism cells use to control whether genes are switched on or off is called
DNA methylation. In this case, molecules called methyl groups are attached to the
DNA in locations that prevent the signal molecule from reaching the switch. These
methyl groups naturally control whether a gene can be turned on when its signal arrives,
in other words, whether the gene will be “expressed.” If access is blocked, the hormone
signal has no effect. Different types of cells within a single person have different methylation
patterns. That’s how cells in all tissue types—eye tissue or muscle tissue or fat
tissue—can share the exact same set of genes but differ widely in what they do. While
methylation occurs naturally, scientific research has proven that DNA methylation is
also influenced by the environment. In fact, some scientists suggest that one purpose
of DNA methylation is to fine tune an individual’s genetic makeup to the environment
into which it will be born

CONTAMINANTS AND FEMALE INFERTILITY

While research focused on the effects of contaminants in the womb has lead to important
breakthroughs in recent years, other studies continue to highlight that contaminants can
cause harm later in childhood and in adulthood. In addition to the evidence that high
occupational exposures to some compounds can lead to sterility in men, one scientist
at Vallombrosa noted that at least six studies have shown links between PCBs, lead,
and other compounds and early onset of puberty in girls. Other investigations have
demonstrated correlations between adult reproductive system effects and exposures to
a range of pesticides; chemicals in cigarette smoke; fuel, hobby and industrial solvents,
such as benzene and dry cleaning fluids; and water disinfection byproducts. Although
the effects sometimes are as striking as increased risk of pregnancy loss (or damaged
sperm and poor fertility in men), often they are more subtle: ovarian and menstrual
cycle alterations, for example, or delays in the amount of time it takes to conceive. Scientists
still know little, however, about the long-term effects of what one Vallombrosa

CHALLENGED CONCEPTIONS:
ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMICALS AND FERTILITY
CHALLENGED CONCEPTIONS:
ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMICALS AND FERTILITY
DOES THE DOSE MAKE THE POISON?

The Renaissance-era physician Paracelsus wrote that “All substances are poisons…The
right dose differentiates a poison and a remedy.” That very idea—that there is a predictable
relationship between the dose of a potentially toxic substance and the health effects
it causes—lies at the heart of the traditional approach to environmental risk assessment
and regulation. Regulators have operated on the assumption that it is possible to identify
a level below which exposure to a given substance poses no risk, allowing them to set a
“no observable effects” exposure threshold. Typically, scientists do such an analysis by
starting with high-dose testing and working down to a dose level where the effects being
observed disappear. Although this holds true for many compounds, newer research,
particularly on endocrine disrupting compounds, has revealed that some chemicals and
health responses do not behave according to this seemingly logical assumption. Some
chemicals have effects at very low doses that can’t be predicted from the results of high-
dose studies.
This means that standard toxicity testing that relies on testing high doses
could miss important effects.

Scientists at the University of Missouri, for instance, have found that when male
mice are exposed in the womb to bisphenol A or the drug DES, low doses cause enlargement
of the prostate gland once the mice mature. Intermediate doses caused no apparent
effects, and higher doses actually caused the prostate to be smaller.

How can this happen? Scientists believe that at low doses
these compounds can stimulate the expression of genes involved
in controlling prostate size. At higher doses, in contrast, they
become toxic and damage the prostate outright. The bottom line:
although the dose-makes-the-poison rationale seems logical, new
science casts serious doubts at least on the way the principal has been
used to develop health standards, particularly when it comes to the
dose it takes to alter the hormonal or genetic signaling systems in a
still-developing fetus.

CHALLENGED CONCEPTIONS:
ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMICALS AND FERTILITY
CHALLENGED CONCEPTIONS:
ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMICALS AND FERTILITY
emerge as the children are born and as they develop.

Which leaves everyone involved with a lingering question: what to do while the
science moves ahead? Viewpoints at the workshop varied. Physicians pointed out that
while patients are eager for information about contaminants and environmental risk
factors, doctors can be reluctant to “get ahead of the science”—that is, unwilling to
make recommendations based on speculation or early and incomplete research. Other
participants made countervailing note of the “precautionary principle”—the notion that
health professionals, or in a broader scope, government regulators, should promote precautionary
action in the face of “weight of credible evidence” of serious toxicity (from,
say, animal studies), even if all the scientific “i’s” haven’t yet been dotted, nor “t’s”
crossed. It seems clear that this is a debate that medical and regulatory communities still
need to resolve.

Issues around communication and education emerged as a powerful theme. Despite
scientists’ and clinical researchers’ hard work investigating the impacts of environmental
chemicals on health, so far there’s been limited information transfer to infertility patients
and reproductive health advocacy groups—and some measure of uncertainty about the
most effective ways to communicate information accumulated so far to physicians and
the general public. One clinician emphasized that medical students are taught little, if
anything, about even well-established environmental chemical threats to reproduction,
and thus they enter their profession with limited ability to ask the right questions about
environmental exposures their patients may face, and limited perspective on the full
range of potential culprits as they conduct diagnostic workups and determine infertility
treatment strategies. Patient advocates stressed that they need translational models and
lay-friendly materials in order to share information with their constituencies.

Among scientists at the workshop, the need for effective communication of another
kind—between scientific disciplines—was stressed as a critical aspect of an expanded
and more coherent environmental reproductive health research program. For example,
researchers attempting to study links between environmental exposures and health
problems in human populations are often limited to conducting either retrospective
(historical) statistical studies of groups to trace trends, or to waiting patiently for the
results of long-term prospective studies like the National Children’s Study that follow
their subjects over periods of many years. Better interdisciplinary communication and
collaboration with scientists conducting actual experiments on lab animals could give
those studying humans a better sense of what endpoints, or potential effects, to look for.

SHOULD PATIENTS/ INDIVIDUALS GET TESTED
FOR THEIR “BODY BURDENS” OF TOXIC CHEMICALS?
SHOULD PATIENTS/ INDIVIDUALS GET TESTED
FOR THEIR “BODY BURDENS” OF TOXIC CHEMICALS?
Biomonitoring, or the testing of human biospecimens such as blood, urine, hair, adipose tissue, bone, etc., for the presence and level of toxic chemicals is a public health tool that has been used primarily by epidemiologists and health researchers for decades to identify trends in chemical use; to determine if some populations or communities might be more highly exposed than others; to establish exposure levels for average Americans; and to determine whether regulations limiting exposures are effective. Biomonitoring data are also used to examine possible linkages between chemical exposures and health outcomes. But in order to generate data that is useful for this purpose, studies need to test large populations as is standard in epidemiological studies.

Erkeklerin kadınsılaşmasının en önemli nedeni çevre kirliliği ve hayatın her alanına giren kimyasallar. Kimyasallar, üremeyi etkiliyor, erkeklerin çocuk sahibi olma kapasitesini düşürüyor.

Chemtrust Vakfı’nın 250’den fazla bilimsel araştırmayı derlediği çalışmaya göre, çevre kirliliği ve son yıllarda hayatın her alanına giren kimyasallar, erkekleri giderek daha kadınsı bir hale getiriyor.

Araştırmada, omurgalı hayvanların her temel sınıfındaki erkek türlerinin çevredeki kimyasallardan etkilendiği, birçok omurgalı türünün erkeklerinde feminen özellikler yaygın şekilde görüldüğü ortaya çıktı.

Gıda ambalajı, kozmetikler, bebek pudraları, mobilya ve elektrikli eşyalar gibi birçok ürün bu kimyasalları içeriyor.

2 KAT FAZLA KIZ ÇOCUĞU
Kanada, Rusya ve İtalya’da bu tür kimyasallarla yoğun biçimde kirlenen bölgelerde yaşayan topluluklarda erkeklerden 2 kat fazla kız çocuğu doğduğu gözlendi. Amerika Birleşik Devletleri ile Japonya’da ise kız bebek sayısı erkek bebekleri 250 bin geçti. Ayrıca 20 ülkede, erkeklerin sperm sayısının son 50 yıl içinde önemli ölçüde düştüğü de belirlendi. Bilim adamları, yetkilileri, çevre kirliliğiyle mücadelede acil önlem almaya çağırdı.

Merhaba Dr. Berksoy ve Bacheci Clinic.
Benim adim Fikriye Ozgun Dr. Murat Berksoyun arkadasi ve hastasiydim. Ben ve esim New York’ta yasiyoruz ve ilk tup bebek denemesi Amerika’da ve ikinci Ankara’da basarisizlikla sonuclandiktan sonra tam bebek sahibi olmaktan vazgecmek uzere iken Dr. Mustafa Bahceciyi ve Dr. Murat Berksoyu bir televizyon programinda izledikten sonra Alman Hastanesinde ucuncu tup bebek denemesini yapmak icin New York’tan Istanbul’a geldik. Ilk olarak Dr. Murat Berksoyun kontrolu ve psikolojik destegi altinda kisa sure icerisinde fazla kilolarimdan kurtuldum. Dr. Murat beyin sayesinde yine bu seferde tutmazsa psikolojisini yendik, kendimize guvenimiz geldi ve dualarimizla sonunda 27 Eylul 2005 senesinde yakisikli tup bebegimiz Efe Murat’a tam 8 sene sonra ucuncu denememizde kavustuk. Sonunda, nur topu gibi yakisikli mi yakisikli , sarisin mi sarisin, mavi gozlu cocugumuz olmustu. Cok mu cok tessekurler, Dr. Murat Berksoy… Kelimeler tesekkurlerimizi anlatmaya yetmez. Bizim, cocuk sahibi olmak isteyenlere tavsiyemiz Dr. Murat Berksoyun sozunde cikmadan, inanclarini kaybetmeden ne gerekiyorsa yapmalaridir. Dunyanin obur ucuna Amerika’ya veya Avrupanin bir baska memleketine gitmenize ve dunyalarca para harcamaniza gerek yok sadece degerli Murat Beyin ve Bahceci kiliniginin ekibinin kiymetini bilin. Biz, oglumuz Efe Murat’a kardes icin zamani geldiginde yine oraya gitmeyi dusunuyoruz.