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Peter Aleff

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I am an engineer, a researcher, and a designer. For most of my professional career, I either planned or built or managed factories in the United States and in France. I also made various inventions in the relevant fields and was granted five patents for some of them, four in the U.S. and one in Mexico.

The reason for my interest in fluorescent light and its connection with eye damage is that my son David was born much too early. He had to spend his first three months in an intensive care nursery and left it brain damaged and blind, like many other preemies exposed to the same damaging environment. His condition led me to spend much time in medical libraries to research his problems.

I also took at that time a job as manager of a factory that cured special inks on printed plastic parts with ultraviolet light. While reading up on the occupational safety aspects of that process, I learned that the strong violet and blue components of regular fluorescent light can severely damage unprotected retinae.

I further found that preemies have none of the adults' protections against that damage, and that the start of the preemie-blinding epidemic coincided with the introduction of fluorescent lamps, first in the US and later again in Europe and other countries as these lamps became available there.

The same line of inquiry led me to connect the current acceleration of age-related macular degeneration, or AMD, to slowly developing eye damage accumulated from the same blue-violet fluorescent light during childhood and adolescence, before our eye lenses become yellow with age and filter out most of the hazardous wavelengths. I am therefore trying to make people aware of these dangers which the medical community does not like to admit because its use of eye-damaging lamps in intensive care nurseries would expose it to great liabilities.

Whenever this campaign against unnecessary blinding leaves me some free time, I like to study history and to write about ancient science and mathematics.

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