hankyoreh

By Mark Whitaker, Professor of Environmental Sociology, Kookmin University
　
First, the Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries is not the Ministry of Pets. Second, since it’s not a law yet, this month the Ministry overreached its jurisdiction by pre-announcing a strange plan to require all dog owners throughout Korea to have their pets　“registered” by 2013 in a revised “Animal Protection Law.” However, what is strange is they plan more than registering. It is further strange that it is not animal protection. They claim to have the right to implant a microchip made of electronics and glass in your pets’ muscle tissue. This is a RFID (radio frequency identification) pellet for ‘live’ tracking-at-a-distance with other electronic equipment. The pellet sends electronic signals from within the body. Its bad health effects have been established so it is animal endangerment instead of protection. Scientific studies repeatedly indicate implanted RFIDs cause cancer in smaller animals. Why accept the chipping of your pets when the danger of cancer is clearly there? Registering the dog is very different than micro-chipping it. I can see the wisdom to get your pets registered, if it becomes the law. However, it’s time to scrap the microchip. I see callous disregard of pet health slyly to piggyback on mere registration a toxic micro-chipping that may endanger your pets’ lives, so it is a very foolish thing to accept. Third, the state doesn’t have any right to insert things in your pets or anyone’s body in general. It’s an issue of bodily integrity. It is one issue to require registration. It is another issue entirely to think they can require your pet to have a damaged body for electronic tracking at a distance without your knowledge.
Don’t let anyone pretend ignorance of these pet cancer dangers associated with RFID. Years ago, after a detailed four-month review, the Associated Press reported in 2007 that “a series of research articles spanning more than a decade found that mice and rats injected with glass-encapsulated RFID transponders developed malignant, fast-growing, lethal cancers in up to 1% to 10% of cases. The tumors originated in the tissue surrounding the microchips and often grew to completely surround the devices, the researchers said. ‘The transponders were the cause of the tumors,’ said Keith Johnson, a retired toxicologic pathologist, explaining in a phone interview the findings of a 1996 study he led...”
I could go on:　
Published in veterinary and toxicology journals between 1996 and 2006, the studies found that lab mice and rats injected with microchips sometimes developed subcutaneous “sarcomas” - malignant tumors, most of them encasing the implants. A 1998 study in Ridgefield, Connecticut, of 177 mice reported cancer incidence to be slightly higher than 10 percent - a result the researchers described as “surprising.” Others might say frightening. A 2006 study in France detected tumors in 4.1 percent of 1,260 microchipped mice just by visual sight alone. This was one of six studies in which the scientists did not set out to find microchip-induced cancer but noticed the growths incidentally. They were testing compounds on behalf of chemical and pharmaceutical companies; but they ruled out the compounds as the tumors’ cause. Because researchers only noted the most obvious tumors, the French study said, “These incidences may therefore slightly underestimate the true occurrence” of cancer. In 1997, a study in Germany found cancers in 1 percent of 4,279 chipped mice. The tumors “are clearly due to the implanted microchips,” the authors wrote.
So there is plenty of evidence of cancer being caused by RFID chips in other animals. There are some mentions for dogs already. Already from 2007 in the United States, malignant tumors in two chipped dogs turned up in the examination of published research and “in one dog,…cancer appeared linked to the presence of the embedded chip; in the other, the cancer’s cause was uncertain.)”. Since that article summarizing the RFID health dangers, updated research finds a continuing stream of other cases of RFID dog cancers and tumors in the United States, with the tumor encasing the implant and sometimes leading to the death of the dog.
Veterinarian oncologist Dr. Cheryl London at the Ohio State University was noted as saying that tens of thousands of dogs have been chipped with RFID already in the United States. Dr. London said she saw a need for the first “20-year study of chipped canines”…“to see if you have a biological effect” of RFID causing cancer in dogs like you see clearly in all other tested animals. There continues to be a lack of any long-term studies of RFID health effects in dogs. Despite this, outrageously, states and cities encourage micro-chipping of dogs without any knowledge at all and with overwhelming scientific studies of RFID causing cancer dangers in other animals and in other individual dogs noted by owners and doctors already. From 2007 to the present, still no one has published a proper long-term scientific study on RFID connections to cancer in dogs. Silence is golden for the RFID industry. However the implications are clear: RFID chips are a dangerous, cancer-causing technology when implanted in biological life in general. It is already known to affect some dogs (and of course to affect humans though that is a story for another time).
Despite all this evidence of harm, I was shocked to learn that cancer-causing animal chipping has been forced on pets since 2009 in some parts of Korea, in Busan, Incheon, Daejeon, Jeju and Gyeonggi Province. Did this occur with or without informing pet owners of the clear risks? I ask Korean city governments and the Ministry involved what scientific studies they reviewed before making a decision for pet chipping when there are clearly demonstrated dangers of harm from RFID over the past decade? If they reviewed nothing scientific, someone is grossly negligent. If a lack of due diligence in Korean city and Ministry decisions on the basic health science is discovered, it is more than merely negligent, it is perhaps criminal since it leads directly to harm. If the latter is true, I’m sure there is justification of a growing ‘perfect storm’ of lawsuits from pet owners concerned about past deaths, sicknesses, and tumors in their pets and concerned about future risks of medical expenses at the hands of needless technological overkill (no pun intended) on pet registration.
Fourth, another issue is the slippery slope of intrusion on Koreans privacy by allowing electronic tracking-at-a-distance without your knowledge. RFID chips are an open invitation to spy and to track something in real time whether pets, clothing, or people associated with them. Over 40 of the world’s leading privacy and civil liberties organizations have called for a moratorium on chipping individual consumer items--much less living things that get cancers growing around RFID chips--because the technology can be used to track in real time without knowledge or consent. Eight years ago, the clothing corporation Bennetton was secretly putting RFID tags into its clothing. The same occurred for a time with Levis Jeans. Both corporations were stopped in a huge consumer backlash when people realized they could be tracked after purchase in the clothing. With the Korean civil society experiencing reverses in democratic expression and civil rights in recent years with illegal spying upon people, the RFID dog database becomes one more way to spy upon people associated with certain registered pets.
Fifth, follow the money. For a United States comparison, its whole fiasco of state recommended chipping was connected to improprieties in the private investment portfolio of a high level administrative appointee who made decisions about the implanting of only a single corporation’s RFIDs and created a private monopoly in this manner, despite demonstrating clear conflicts of financial interest. This person was soon after their state resignation, rewarded with high-level private appointments and investments in an RFID industry monopoly created by his administrative fiat. Thus, he later privately profited in his own administrative forcing of RFIDs to be implanted in a population. In the U.S, the Food and Drug Administration--like the Korean Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries--is administrated by high-level political appointees. Its political appointees in the United States were in the Department of Health and Human Services. At the time when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved only the VeriChip Corporation’s RFID for implants in humans, the Department of Health and Human Services was headed by Tommy Thompson. Merely two weeks after the VeriChip implant approval became law on January 10, 2005, Thompson left his appointed post. Within five months, Thompson was a full board member of the private RFID monopoly that his previous decisions created in VeriChip’s products, by only authorizing one manufacturer. Thompson was additionally made a full board member of another corporation marketing that RFID (Applied Digital Solutions, with its subsidiary PositiveID marketing the encouraged monopoly of VeriChip). Strangely, Thompson was only paid in immediate cash (for services already rendered?) and stock options.
In the Korean case, the Lee Administration’s political appointee pick for Minister for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries is Suh Kyu-yong, previously Vice Minister of the same. However, it is reported that the nominated Suh Kyu-yong received direct payments from his own Ministry while Vice Minister. He received a government subsidy that he administered himself through the Rice Income Preservation Payment Project for a two-year period, despite living in Seoul and as he said farming only on some holidays and occasional weekends for those two years. As vice minister, it is reported that Suh was responsible for introducing the direct payment system that he later benefited from personally. [Kyunghyang Shinmun, 2011-05-27] It is in these kinds of crony connections within the Ministry that one might find another equally corrupting financial incentive: that RFID corporations may have the government force the health danger of RFIDs upon Korea when consumers reject it. Which RFID corporations are the pick of the Ministry?
In 2010, the summarized knowledge of RFID connections to health dangers and cancer was presented by invitation at the international conference for the Institute for Electronic and Electrical Engineers, the world’s leading professional association for electrical technology. This conference report is found here: www.antichips.com/cancer/index.html. So electrical engineers know. Dog owners know. Medical doctors and particularly oncologists know. Why allow the Korean state and Ministry to feign ignorance on the harm this does?
If people decide to let the state register pets, certainly it is fine. However, it is a separate issue to give anyone the right to insert cancer-causing microchips into living things. The Korean state is doing this without any legitimate data on its safety. Instead all the data on RFID points to its needlessly introduced harm from cancer, so it’s incredibly foolish. Furthermore, it is a slippery slope from implanted cancer chips in pets to cancer chips in children or hospital patients with the same disastrous cancerous results--with now knowledge of other RFID dangers like how implanted chips can accidentally interfere with and turn off lifesaving medical technology nearby.
Don’t repeat other’s mistakes, ignorance, and ambivalence on this issue. It is germane to do further research on the associations between Korean health and RFID. It is important to ask the Ministry what health studies it analyzed in dogs before considering RFID? Given the unfortunate tarnished record of Korean administrative corruption in many of President Lee’s political appointees, it is very germane to find any potential conflicts of interest in RFID investment portfolios in current political appointees pushing a technology associated with known health, privacy, and political corruption dangers in the United States.
　
The views presented in this column are the writer’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those of The Hankyoreh.