Sublethal Exposure to Microwave Radar

To the Editor.  —Drs Castillo and Quencer¹ are to be commended for their letter in the Jan 15 issue of JAMA. It details an interesting case report of a radiation injury following a single brief exposure to radar. What is not fully appreciated by our profession is that repeated irradiations at subclinical levels can produce pathology that appears only after delay.Bowers and Frey² reported how the general population is being exposed to an ever-increasing amount of spurious, nonionizing radiation from at least two different sources. The first relates to communitywide broadcast radiation from station transmitters such as radars and earth-satellite telecommunication networks, where achievable power output has doubled with every passing decade. The second relates to nearby personal-use devices such as faulty microwave ovens and video display terminals, which have increased in number exponentially during each decade.Unlike the rare case of Drs Castillo and Quencer, the