February 6… Assessing health risks is a tricky business. Teaching others how to do it is no easier.
To see this, you need to look no further than a recent report from the Geneva-based International Risk Governance Council (IRGC), a self-described
"independent" group run by a group of government, industry and academic leaders. The title of the report is a mouthful:
Risk Governance Deficits: An Analysis and Illustration of the Most Common Deficits in Risk Governance.
A better title would have been, Common Pitfalls in Risk Analysis, or perhaps, Risk: A Guide to Better Decision Making.
The handbook runs 91 pages with case studies on hot-button issues, including genetically modified food, mad cow disease and EMFs.
It offers some sensible recommendations, such as: Don't provide biased, selective or incomplete information about potential risks,
especially from stakeholders who may seek to advance their own interests (pp.22-23). Just about everybody would agree with that advice,
but when the report turns to EMFs, forget about it. Once again, the basic rules governing conflicts of interest don't apply to EMFs.
Here's the summary of the EMF case study reprinted in the IRGC report:
A success? Hardly. The only EMF success stories over the last 30 years tell how the electric utility and cell phone industries have prevailed —largely by suppressing research and marginalizing the health issue. We have made very little progress understanding what power-line or cell phone EMFs do to us over the last 25 years, and that owes a lot to the success of their game plan.We conclude that risk management of EMFs has certainly not been perfect, but for power-frequency EMFs risk management has evolved and can be largely considered a success. Lessons from the power-frequency experience can benefit risk governance of radiofrequency EMFs and other emerging technologies. (p.68)
If this reads like industry propaganda, that's because it is. The case study was written by two long-time operatives of the electric utility industry: Leeka Kheifets and John Swanson (together with Shaiela Kandel, an Israeli associate). Anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of the EMF health issue would be aware that Kheifets has been associated with EPRI for most of her professional career and that Swanson is an employee of the National Grid, one of the world's largest electric utilities. Clearly, they are "stakeholders" of the utility industry and IRGC should have asked a more neutral party to write the EMF case study, if it had operated under its own rules. (For more on Kheifets and Swanson's activities, see "The Real Junk Science of EMFs.")The main lesson to be learned from power-frequency experience is that an open and proactive approach to research allowed for a successful management of a potentially volatile issue that could have had tremendous societal costs. While some uncertainty remains, it is widely accepted that the health effect, even if real, is not of major public health significance.
February 1… Two news items, both posted today, show once again the polarization within the RF–health community.
The Oman Daily Observer features a report
from a meeting held in Muscat over the weekend, under the headline, "International Conference Allays Fears on Effects of RF Exposure."
Mike Repacholi, the former head of the WHO EMF project and chairman emeritus of ICNIRP,
is quoted as reassuring the 400-strong audience that none of the close to 3,000 studies that have been done to date worldwide has established that there are any adverse effects below the level set by the international standards. The
invited speakers at the meeting reads like a Who's Who of ICNIRP, past and present —including Anders Ahlbom, David Black, Jim Lin, Ken McLeod, Paolo Vecchia, Luc Verschaeve and Bernard Veyret. The cell phone
industry was also well represented. Mike Dolan, Mike Milligan and Jack
Rowley from the MOA, MMF and GSMA,
respectively, were all on the schedule. Two representatives from ICEMS, Libby Kelley from the U.S. and Nesrin Seyhan from Turkey, were also invited. ICEMS, unlike ICNIRP,
favors a precautionary approach. Kelley decided to withdraw two weeks ago.
Before we had a chance to finish the story from Oman, we received the latest bulletin from
NEXT-UP, the European
activist group. "Repacholi has betrayed the obligations of his office [at WHO]," it charged, "he is corrupt, he must answer for what he has done. He must be brought to justice!"
Where's the middle ground?
January 22 (updated January 26)… Out on the newsstands today: the February issue of GQ magazine with a feature article on cell
phones and cancer. "Warning: Your Cell Phone May Be Hazardous to Your Health," by Christopher Ketcham, draws a parallel between the cover-up of incriminating research on tobacco and microwaves. Ketcham cites
the work of Allan Frey, Henry Lai,
Jerry Phillips, Leif Salford — and the
coverage by Microwave News. The article is available on the magazine's
Web site.
January 18… Most managers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
(NIEHS) refuse to allow that the EMF–cancer playbook may be different from the one for chemicals.
Even now, when there is ample evidence that
power line EMFs can increase the risk of childhood leukemia and there is a growing suspicion that cell phone radiation is associated with three different types of tumors,
NIEHS prefers to look the other way. The institute has long resisted endorsing precautionary policies for any kind of EMFs.
The latest case in point involves John Bucher, a senior NIEHS official who
runs the National Toxicology Program (NTP). During his 27-year career at NTP/NIEHS, Bucher has
evaluated the dangers of any number of chemicals. He is currently taking the lead on BPA, the
controversial plastic additive, as well as radiation from cell phones.
In a story featured on the front pages of North Carolina's
leading newspapers earlier this month, Bucher declared that he doesn't believe that cell phones can cause cancer. "I anticipate either no correlation or, if anything
is seen at all, it won't be a strong signal," he said.
Bucher was referring to a massive NTP project designed to see whether long-term exposure to cell phone radiation can cause cancer in rats and mice.
It is the largest single cancer study ever undertaken by the NTP/NIEHS with a budget of $25 million, maybe more. NIEHS spent ten years planning the project.
What's not explicitly stated in the news article is that the long-term study has not actually started.
December 18… Pity those who are trying to follow the cell phone–brain tumor story. Their sense of the cancer risk is most likely a reflection of the last thing they read or
saw on TV —It all depends on whose sound bite they happen to catch.
Take, for example, a paper published earlier this month in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI)
by a team of Scandinavian epidemiologists, under a rather bland title —
"Time Trends in Brain Tumor Incidence Rates
in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, 1974–2003." But its message is anything but:
Because there has been no increase in brain tumors between 1998 and 2003, a period when the use of cell phones "increased sharply,"
cell phones are cancer safe.
December 7… Bioelectromagnetics has posted
“Comments” by Louis Slesin,
the editor of Microwave News on
the call to stop research on power-frequency electric fields by
Leeka Kheifets and John Swanson (see “The Real Junk Science of EMFs,” below). The two electric utility insiders declined the journal's
offer to respond. The comments are now on the journal's Web site and will be published in its February 2010 issue.
See also “Three Cases of Alleged Scientific Misconduct”
November 23… A decade after some of the world's leading epidemiologists agreed that exposure to power line EMFs could lead to childhood leukemia, the denial continues.
Some people still believe that the studies that link EMFs to cancer are nothing more than junk science. Even those who should know better refuse to acknowledge the risks.
The World Health Organization (WHO) says the association is so weak that it can be pretty much ignored, and the
leading radiation protection group, the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), has refused to endorse precaution.
Here in the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scarcely acknowledges that EMFs are even a health issue.
As a result, money for research has dried up, and any number of promising avenues that might have moved the issue forward remains unexplored.
How did this happen? The answer has a lot to do with junk science, but not the kind often associated with EMFs.
No one would deny that the EMF literature is peppered with poor studies —those that claim to show effects that can't be repeated.
This happens with EMFs, as well as all other types of research. In this case, we are referring to industry's own brand of junk science that promotes misinformation
and confusion and presents a distorted picture of EMF science.
The story that follows illustrates how electric utilities play the junk science game. It shows how two of its long-time operatives are corrupting the EMF literature.
Leeka Kheifets and John Swanson, together with two utility
associates, are calling for an end to research on the links between power-line electric fields and cancer.
In a paper that will appear in the February 2010 issue of Bioelectromagnetics, Kheifets and Swanson argue that studies on electric fields and
cancer have come to a dead end and that its time to close the book on them. There is "little basis for continued research," they claim. In fact, it is just the opposite.
Epidemiologic studies on electric field effects on workers have produced some of the most provocative findings in the entire EMF cancer literature. This work has been
ignored for years and now Kheifets and Swanson want to bury it for good.
November 6… De-Kun Li's new epidemiological study showing that extended
exposure to weak magnetic fields as low as 1.6 mG (0.16 µT) can have negative effects on sperm quality was published today by Reproductive Toxicology.
"This is the first demonstration of a link between EMF exposure and the decline of semen quality," Li told Microwave News. The study, which was carried out in Shanghai, has important
implications for overall fertility because approximately 40% of the Shanghai population is exposed to more than 1.6 mG for 2.4 hours on a daily basis.
The study, a collaboration with Chinese researchers, documented detrimental effects on a number of different indices of male fertility including semen morphology, motility, density and vitality. The effect on sperm
quality follows a dose-response relationship: the longer the daily exposure above 1.6 mG, the greater the risk. Men who were exposed for more than six hours a day were three-to-four times more likely to have decreased fertility.
The research team notes that the real risk is probably higher. "[S]ince everyone is exposed to some levels of magnetic fields, we did not have a totally 'unexposed' reference group in our study population. Therefore, the magnitude of
the effect observed in this study is likely underestimated," they note.
They also comment that what they have seen is biologically "plausible" because experimental studies in China and Korea have shown that magnetic fields can affect the reproductive system of mice.
Li first announced this finding at a scientific conference a year ago last summer: see our
post of July 3, 2008. Now the full
details are available in the new paper. Li is with Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, CA.
Deleterious effects have now been shown for both power-frequency EMFs and RF/microwave radiation (see
"Keep That Phone Out of Your Trouser Pocket!"). The same mechanism could be at work at both high and low frequencies," Li said.
October 28… Saturday's lead story in the Telegraph made believe that the U.K. daily had gotten hold of the much-delayed and
much sought-after final results of the Interphone study — and that they showed that using a cell phone does
indeed increase the risk of developing a brain tumor. Under the headline "Mobiles: New Cancer Alert," the newspaper proclaimed that, "Long-term use of mobile phones may be linked to some cancers, a landmark international study
will conclude later this year." In its inside pages were a number of related stories, notably "People Must Be Told About Mobile Phone Dangers, Say Experts" and a sidebar about
Larry Mills who had developed a tumor "exactly
where he held the phone." The story was pitched as an "EXCLUSIVE" and was soon picked up by many other newspapers and Web sites.
In fact, the Telegraph had no scoop. Its reporters did not have an advance copy of the Interphone brain tumor paper. The story was mostly a rehash of what has
already been disclosed —a lot of it a long time ago. For instance, quotes from Elisabeth Cardis,
the head of Interphone, which ran three paragraphs on the front page, were exactly the same as had been reported in Microwave News back in June 2008
(see: "Interphone Project: The Cracks Begin To Show; Cardis Endorses Precaution").
Cardis was also quoted in the Telegraph as saying the Interphone paper would include a public health message. "I said of course there would be one," she told
Microwave News, "We need to make a statement about the public health relevance of our findings." But, she added, she had also told the Telegraph that she was "not at liberty to discuss it or the results of the
study." Cardis is with the Center for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL) in Barcelona.
The source of the Telegraph story remains unknown. (The obvious possibility is the newspaper's marketing department in a ploy to boost circulation.)
"I have no clue what initiated this article," Joachim Schüz told Microwave News. Schüz, the head of the German Interphone group, is now in Copenhagen at the Danish Cancer Society.
Two other members of the Interphone project have also stated that that there was no basis for the story. "There is, as far as I know, absolutely no information circulating at the
moment that is accurate and correct with respects to the results of that study," Bruce
Armstrong, the head of the Australian Interphone team at the University of Sydney, told the Australian Broadcasting
Corp. Earlier this year, Armstrong gave a public lecture in which he said that the Interphone study is inconclusive but that the suggestion of a long-term risk
prompted him to advise taking precautionary measures such as discouraging children from using mobile phones (see: "Cell Phone Link to Tumors? — "We Don't Know").
The harshest criticism of the Telegraph came from the Karolinska Institute's Maria Feychting, who
leads the Swedish Interphone group. "It's unethical and astounding for this to be in the press before the study is completely and fully analyzed," she told the
Expressen, a Swedish
tabloid. Feychting also voiced her disagreement with the substance of the Telegraph's story. "There is no indication that cell phones pose any health risk
over the short term," she said. "In the long run, that is, for more than ten years, the data are less reliable."
When then can we expect to see the Interphone results? Ten months after the new director of IARC,
Christopher Wild,
made their release a high priority, that is still a matter of speculation (see "IARC Director
Forces Publication of Interphone Brain Tumor Results"). When asked this question at a conference
in Paris last week, Dan Krewski, of the University of Ottawa and a member of the Canadian Interphone team, replied that the paper is
currently under review at a journal and that "hopefully" it would be available "this calendar year." But in the halls outside the lecture room, some expressed a less sanguine outlook. They
predicted that the results would not be available until sometime in 2010.
October 14… A new analysis of already-published studies points to a tumor risk following long-term use of cell phones. This
meta-analysis by a joint Korean-U.S. team of 13 past studies was published yesterday in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Its conclusions support
two previous similar efforts: All three indicate a 20-25% increase in tumors after ten or more years of cell phone use. September 30 (last updated on October 2)… Mice that were placed under short-term stress before being exposed to UV radiation, a known cancer-causing agent,
developed fewer skin tumors than those that just got the UV. These new findings from
Firdaus Dhabhar's lab
at Stanford University medical school were released by Brain, Behavior and Immunity a few days ago.
September 15 (last updated on October 9) … Yesterday's Senate hearing on Health Effects of Cell Phone Use, chaired by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), was a standing-room-only affair. C-Span has
posted a complete video and transcript of the 105-minute hearing. (The Senate Appropriations Committee has also
posted a video of the hearing.) The prepared testimonies of the witnesses may be downloaded
from the Appropriations Committee Web site.
There was a last-minute addition to the witness list: Harkin invited Olga Naidenko of the Environmental Working Group (EWG) to testify. See
September 10 for a list of the other witnesses. The hearing was requested by Sen.
Arlen Specter. A third senator, Mark Pryor (D-AR), made a brief appearance. September 10… Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA)
has posted the witness list
for next Monday afternoon's hearing on The Health Effects of Cell Phone Use. John Bucher, the associate
director of the National Toxicology Program (NTP), will be first to testify. He will be followed by a panel of four:
Devra Davis of the University of Pittsburgh; Linda Erdreich of Exponent, a consulting firm;
Dariusz Leszczynski of Finland's radiation protection authority (STUK); and Israeli epidemiologist
Siegal Sadetzki, a member of the Interphone study group.
"I went into this really dubious that anything was going on," Joel Moskowitz
of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, told the
Los Angeles Times.
"Overall, you find no difference. But when you start teasing the studies apart and doing these subgroup analyses, you do find there is reason to be concerned."
Moskowitz is one of the coauthors of the new study; the lead author is Seung-Kwon Myung of South Korea's National Cancer Center.
The Korean and U.S. researchers argue that the epidemiological studies by Lennart Hardell, of
Sweden's Örebro University, are of a higher quality than those from the
Interphone project.
A team from the University of Utah published the first meta-analysis with long-term exposure data two years ago.
Hardell's group published the second last year.
Still no word on when the Interphone group will release its paper on brain tumor risks.
New Study Confirms Confounding in Cell Phone Animal Project
Dhabhar's study is the first specifically designed to test the hypothesis that stress can protect against tumors.
But his results are eerily similar to those obtained in a set of $10 million animal experiments, known as PERFORM-A,
that were supposed to investigate the cancer risks associated with cell-phone radiation.
In each case, the animals were restrained inside plastic tubes: in Dhabhar's study to put the mice under stress, and in the PERFORM-A project to keep the animals in a fixed position in order
to deliver a well-defined dose of radiation. And, in each case, the stress had a dramatic —and very similar— impact on the animals.
In the six PERFORM-A experiments, carried out in six different countries, mice and rats that were
restrained for a few hours a day developed, in most cases, fewer tumors than free-roaming animals. See, for instance,
the graph below from the PERFORM-A study on rats by Robert Hruby at what is
now known as the Austrian Institute of Technology.
Compare the incidence of tumors among the shams (in pink), which were restrained inside the tubes and placed in a Ferris wheel exposure system but did not
get any radiation, with that of
the cage controls (top, in blue), which also did not get any radiation, but were allowed to run free. (The three middle curves are for the rats that were exposed to varying
levels of RF/microwave radiation in the Ferris wheel.) The shams had much fewer tumors —a result that is consistent with Dhabhar's study.
Dhabhar applied the stress intentionally to see its effect on tumor formation; the PERFORM-A researchers did it in error, a side effect of the experimental design.
The two sets of results may help us get a better handle on the biology of stress. But it also means that the PERFORM-A results cannot do what they were supposed to do. They cannot shed
light on whether cell phones can lead to cancer because the effects of the stress are mixed up with any possible effects of the radiation, and they cannot be disentangled.
There are many differences between the two studies. For instance, in the Dhabhar experiment, the mice were placed inside the plastic tubes for two-and-a-half hours before their 10-minute UV
exposures. In the Hruby study, the rats were restrained in the tubes for four hours a day during the radiation or sham exposure. Also Dhabhar only put the mice under stress for the first ten weeks of
his 32-week study. Hruby's sham-exposed rats were placed in the tubes throughout the six-month experiment. And most of all Dhabhar's animals were treated with radiation, while the shams in
PERFORM-A were not. Nevertheless, the similarity of the results is remarkable.
Members of the PERFORM-A project chose to ignore the possible confounding effects of stress on the animals, even after a preliminary
experiment clearly indicated that mice placed in the exposure system were showing biochemical signs of stress.
For a detailed discussion of these RF-animal experiments, see our special report:
"Wheel on Trial: $10 Million Industry Research Project Flops."
Nor has there been any detailed discussion of the potential role of stress in the PERFORM-A studies since the final results were published. All the while, they
continue to be cited as evidence that mobile phones are cancer-free. PERFORM-A was the brainchild of Motorola and
was largely funded by the mobile phone industry through the MMF and the
GSMA, with support from the EC's Fifth Framework Program.
For more on Dhabhar's study, see his abstract, the
Stanford press release and the write-up in
The Scientist. For specifics on each of the PERFORM-A
experiments, including tumor counts, see the Table of Cell Phone Animal Studies (1997–2007),
which is part of our special report, "Wheel on Trial."
A few sound bites from the hearing:
• "What worried me was that, in my study, I saw consistent positive results and they always appeared where there is biological plausibility. They did not appear in this group or in that group. They appeared in the more than ten years [group],
they appeared on the
same side where the phone was held, they appeared for the heavy users and they appeared in rural areas compared to urban areas and this also has had biological plausibility …
So the fact that all of these indications appeared where they should have appeared told me that it was really a
red light. But as a scientist, this is not enough, definitely not for causality, but an indication that, according to my judgment, it is enough in order to advise the precautionary principle"
—Siegal Sadetzki on her Israeli Interphone study;
• "While the weight of the current scientific evidence has not conclusively linked cell phones with any health problems, we and other scientific organizations … have concluded that better data
are needed to establish any potential risks to humans" —John Bucher;
• "In the present situation of the scientific uncertainty, the statements that the use of mobile phones is safe are premature."
—Dariusz Leszczynski;
• "The current scientific evidence does not demonstrate that wireless cause cancer or other adverse health effects" —Linda Erdreich,
on behalf of the CTIA;
• "I am not alarmed, I am concerned" —Devra Davis;
• "EWG strongly believes that the government should support additional research into this important health question" —Olga Naidenko;
• "Let me tell you where I come out …We just don't know what the answer is … Precautions are not a bad idea. They may not be a good idea, but they
are not a bad idea. And the issue of children is something we should look at a little more closely … We have a duty to do more by protecting children. The question, I think,
boils down to what additional studies are necessary" —Sen. Arlen Specter;
"I found this really very interesting and very challenging and I can assure you we are going to do some follow-up on this" —Sen. Tom Harkin.
Some links to the press coverage on the hearing:
• "Researchers Push for New Cell Phone Safety Standards" (CNET);
• "Cell Phones: Feds Probing Health Impacts";
"Cell Phones: Precautions Recommended"
and
"For Kids: Are Cell Phones Safe?"; (Science News);
• "U.S. Senator Promises Look into Cellphone-Cancer Link" (Reuters);
• "Is Your Cell Phone Melting Your Brain? Not Yet" (PC Magazine);
• "Experts Urge More Study of Cellphone Radiation, Especially on Kids" (USA Today);
• "Scientists Call on U.S Senate To Issue Advice on Mobile Phones" (U.K. Telegraph);
• "Cancer Risk of Cell Phones Debated" (Detroit News);
• "Mixed Verdict on Mobile Phones as Cancer Cause" (Voice of America);
• "Cell Phone Radiation Risks: Why the Jury's Still Out" (Time);
• "Is Cell-Phone Safety Assured? Or Merely Ignored?" (BusinessWeek);
• "More Research on Cell Phone Safety Needed, Experts Say" (American Cancer Society);
• "Safety Advocates Gain Ground in Cell Phone Debate" (Contra Costa Times, California);
• "How Safe Is Your Mobile Phone?" (The Age, Australia);
• "Cell Phones and Cancer - How To Stay Safe" (Dr. Andrew Weil).
Other resources:
• Sen. Harkin's press release;
• CTIA's press release;
• Environmental Working Group's (EWG) report, Cell Phone Radiation Report;
• International EMF Collaborative's report, Cellphones and Brain Tumors: 15 Reasons for Concern, Science, Spin and the Truth Behind Interphone.
Davis, Leszczynski and Sadetzki will also be speaking at the conference on cell phones and health that begins on Sunday afternoon and continues through Tuesday, with a break for the Senate hearing. The
program
has evolved since it was first announced last month. For instance,
Michael Wyde of the NIEHS, who is overseeing the NTP's $22 million
RF-animal study at IITRI, will now be speaking on Monday morning. David Servan-Schreiber,
the author of Anti-Cancer, cannot attend the meeting in Washington, but will participate from his home base in France via Skype, as will
Lennart Hardell, of Örebro University, from Sweden, according to Davis. A revised agenda will be posted tomorrow.
Libby Kelley, who is helping organize the conference, told Microwave News that the press will no longer be asked to pay the $100 registration fee (see August 18 below). The meeting will be taped, Davis said, and video
excerpts will be posted on the Internet.
One of our alert readers has reminded us that there was a Senate hearing on RF/microwave health effects more recently than 30 years ago. Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-CT)
held a hearing on The Effects of Traffic Radar Guns on Law Enforcement Officers on August 10, 1992. At the time,
Sens. Lieberman and Christopher Dodd (D-CT) called on NIOSH to do an epidemiological study on the possible link between police radar use and cancer.
"Senator Dodd and I are going to stick with this until we get some answers," Lieberman said (see MWN, S/O92, p.7).
NIOSH never did the study and neither Lieberman nor Dodd ever followed-up.
August 18… Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA)
will hold a hearing on cell phones and health on September 14. So says Devra Davis, an activist scientist at the University of Pittsburgh. If Specter follows through, it
would be the centerpiece of a conference she is organizing that week in Washington, as well as a triumph for Davis herself. She is
on a mission to make cell phones a more visible public health issue in the U.S. and to secure funding for a major research program. It would be the first time in more than 30 years that the U.S. Senate has addressed
RF/microwave health risks. August 17… Make that research teams in six countries, not five, that have implicated cell phones in causing harm to
male fertility (see yesterday's post). Last December, a group led by Nader Salama at Japan's Tokushima University medical school
reported that the sperm of rabbits, whose testes were exposed to 800 MHz radiation for eight hours
a day for 12 weeks, had lower counts and motility, as well as changes in the biological structures where the sperm is formed
(Seminiferous tubules). The counts and motility stayed relatively stable for the first few weeks
and then, in each case, took a sudden, big drop —in week six for counts and week eight for motility. August 16… It's the strongest warning yet. John
Aitken, a well-known fertility researcher, is advising men who want
to have children not to keep active mobile phones below their waists. This issue, he says, "deserves our immediate attention."
"I have spoken and met with Senator Specter and his senior staffers," Davis told
Microwave News. "They are planning to hold a hearing on this important topic." Among those who will
be invited to testify, she said, are Frank Barnes of
the University of Colorado, Boulder, Margaret Hamburg, the
commissioner of the FDA, Dariusz Leszczynski
of Finland's radiation protection agency (STUK), Israeli
epidemiologist Siegal Sadetzki, a member of the
Interphone group,
as well as Davis herself. Barnes served as the chairman of the committee that prepared the 2008 National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council report on research needs on
potential impacts of wireless radiation. Leszczynski is helping to organize the conference and Sadetzki is on its steering committee.
Davis is confident enough to have included the Specter hearing in the draft agenda of the conference, which she has posted on the Web site of the
Environmental Health Trust, an offshoot of the
Devra Lee Davis Charitable Foundation.
The Expert Conference on Cell Phones and Public Policy
Questions will be held September 13-15 at the Credit Union House, which is strategically located "within walking distance of the Senate."
Davis said that the official invitations for the meeting have not yet been sent out due to "press of health care issues." She cautioned, "Of course, the timing of events in Washington are difficult to predict."
Specter is deeply involved in the health care reform debate and is facing a tough reelection campaign. A picture of him being confronted by an angry constituent at a town hall meeting was on the
front-page of the New York Times last week with a story headlined,
"Senator Goes Face to Face with Dissent." Specter is
a brain tumor survivor; he is also fighting
Hodgkin's disease.
John Myers, a Specter legislative aide, did not respond to a request for confirmation that the hearing will be held on September 14.
Davis assured Microwave News that the Senator's staff is fully engaged in preparing for the
hearing, even though no formal announcement has yet been made.
The cell phone industry is largely boycotting the conference. The only industry participant on the latest version of the agenda is Jack Rowley of the
GSM Association. He is listed as "invited." Rowley is on vacation this week and was unavailable for comment. Davis said
that he is still "mulling it over." Motorola's C.K. Chou declined to come because he felt the list of invited speakers is not balanced. The current program does favor the side of the
cell phone debate that favors precaution. The only possible source of disagreement among the speakers would likely come from Om
Gandhi of the University
of Utah and Niels Kuster of IT'IS Foundation who have been feuding
for over a decade over the potential risks to children.
Davis sees the meeting as a first step towards establishing an RF health research program in the U.S. For the last 25 years,
the federal government has funded very few studies. To that end, Specter's support is key.
Over the last year, Davis has worked hard to raise the visibility of cell phone health risks. Last July, Ronald
Herberman, the then director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, issued a
call for precaution in the use
of cell phones —a move she encouraged (see our posts of July 23, 25 & 28, 2008). While the
initiative prompted a good amount of press coverage, it was badly received by the cancer establishment, some members of which have been critical of her 2007 book,
The Secret History of the War on Cancer. Davis no longer has a position
at the cancer center. She said she resigned. Davis remains a professor at the
University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health. She said that she would continue to have an appointment at the school through the 2009-2010 academic year. At
the same time she has moved her office to Washington.
In September 2008, not long after he issued his appeal, Herberman testified at a Congressional hearing called by Rep. Denis Kucinich (D-OH). He
said that, looking at government statistics, he had been "struck" by the fact that the incidence of brain cancer has been increasing over the last ten years, particularly among 20-29 year-olds.
(See our "Are Brain Cancer Rates Rising Among Young Adults?") The peer-reviewed paper
with those results will appear soon, Davis said. She and Herberman and Melissa
Bondy of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston are all coauthors of the forthcoming paper. Bondy will also be at the conference.
Kucinich and Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA)
have been invited to participate at a round-table discussion on September 15 at the close of the conference.
Part of the money for the meeting has come from a grant to the University of Pittsburgh from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).
Chris Portier, an associate director of the institute, is a member of the
conference steering committee. On July 31, the
Competence Initiative for the Protection of Humanity, Environment and Democracy in Germany issued an
"Appeal to Support the Conference." It stated, in part, "If the conference in Washington fails for financial
reasons, this would mean to miss a great chance that independent research is heard in the political field."
Money seems to be in short enough supply that Davis is planning
to ask reporters (Microwave News included) to pay the $100 registration fee she is asking from all attendees except invited speakers. That may hamper press coverage.
One long-time Washington journalist was skeptical. "No one from the press will come," he predicted.
Salama used actual GSM phones in standby mode, which would mean relatively low exposures. This prompted Germany's Alex
Lerchl to express his "severe concerns" about the "exposure conditions" as well as the "reported biological effects." His
letter to the editor of the International Journal of
Andrology, was posted on journal's Web site on August 10. In his reply, Salama, who is now at the Alexandria Faculty of Medicine in Egypt,
stood by the results as originally published. Lerchl has emerged as a frequent and aggressive critic of those who publish papers showing mobile phone effects. For some time, he has tried to force the retraction of
two papers from Hugo Rüdiger's lab at the Medical University of Vienna showing cell-phone radiation induced DNA breaks. To date, Rüdiger has refused.
Once Again, Australia’s Aitken Sees DNA Damage
Aitken's research group at the University of Newcastle in Australia has found that human sperm exposed to mobile phone radiation (1.8 GHz) for 16 hours had reduced vitality and motility, two key indices
of fertility. Notably, he has also confirmed his own previous study, published in 2005, which showed that RF radiation
could lead to DNA damage. In that earlier experiment, he had exposed mice to 900 MHz signals and then looked at the animals' sperm, in contrast to the new study in which he exposed semen collected from
human volunteers.
The new data show striking dose responses for all three effects over a wide range of SARs —above 0.4 W/Kg and up to 27.5 W/Kg.
The changes in motility and vitality became statistically significant at 1 W/Kg and the DNA damage at 2.8 W/Kg. In all cases, the statistical reliability of the effects became much more
significant with higher SARs. These new results appear in a paper published on
July 31 in PLoS ONE, a Web-based, peer-reviewed journal. All Public Library of Science journals offer free access to all.
"After 16 hours exposure, there was clear evidence of DNA damage," Aitken said
at a fertility conference in Brisbane last fall when he first presented these findings. Aitken is the director of the Australian Research Council's
Center of Excellence in Biotechnology and Development.
"Several independent lines of evidence suggest that RF-EMR has the potential to influence semen quality and could be an important contributor
to DNA damage in the male germ line," Aitken told Microwave News. He said that he would like to see more studies done, especially ones with the statistical power
to determine whether RF can indeed affect male fertility.
In an interview published
last month, Martine Hours, the chief science advisor to the
French RF research program, also called for more fertility studies.
Importantly, Aitken also demonstrates a "potential causative mechanism" as to how RF radiation can lead to DNA damage. He acknowledges that cell phone signals
do not have enough energy to directly break chemical bonds, but, he goes on, "[T]his form of radiation may have other effects on larger scale systems such as
cells and organelles, which stem from the perturbation of charged molecules and the disruption of electron flow." Specifically he believes that the RF can cause leakage of electrons from the
mitochondria and produce reactive oxygen species
(ROS), which in turn can attack DNA. This process, he states, is unrelated to thermal stress.
Over a decade ago in a follow-up to their landmark 1995
study which showed that RF radiation
can lead to DNA breaks in the brains of exposed rats, Henry Lai and
N.P. Singh
showed that the DNA breaks were caused by free radicals. (For more on EMFs and DNA damage, see the recent review by Lai, Singh and Jerry Phillips of the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs.)
Aitken found an analogous dose-response relationship for the production of free radicals with increasing SAR —a highly significant one— to the ones for motility, vitality and DNA damage. "[T]he profiles of all the observed
effects with respect to SAR were intriguingly similar, suggesting a common underlying mechanism," Aitken writes.
Another of Aitken's results may also be quite meaningful: Only a subset of the sperm cells was vulnerable to RF-induced oxidative stress. "[A]ll of the responses examined showed an extremely
rapid change at low SAR exposures that then reached a plateau at a point where around 30% of the sperm population was affected," Aitken reports, but he is quick to add,
"[T]his does not mean that a majority of spermatozoa would not, ultimately, be affected by RF-EMR in vivo." It might well depend on the duration of the exposure, he says.
These new results from Australia are consistent with those of Ashok Agarwal
and coworkers at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. In a
paper published last year in Fertility and Sterility, Agarwal also reported decreases in sperm motility and viability
and increases in ROS in human semen. He concluded, "[K]eeping [a] cell phone in a trouser pocket in talk mode may negatively affect spermatozoa and impair male fertility." Yet, in a subsequent
interview
with Newsweek, when he was asked where he kept his phone, Agarwal replied: "In my pants pocket." Because, he explained, he does not use a hands-free set (the phone is on standby,
not talk mode, there, resulting in less exposure). And because "I already have two children."
Agarwal had previously observed an association between semen quality and cell phone use among men who had visited an infertility clinic. "Semen analysis … showed a decrease in
sperm count, motility, viability, and normal morphology with the increase in daily use of cell phone," he reported in that earlier paper,
also published in Fertility and Sterility. (For a piece on U.S. press coverage of some of Agarwal's early RF-fertility work, see our
posts of October 26 and 27, 2006.)
In the last few years, a second U.S. group (in
Wisconsin) as well as others in
Hungary,
Poland and
Turkey —that makes five countries in all—
have all shown detrimental effects of cell-phone use or cell-phone radiation on sperm.
In his 2005 paper on the effects of RF radiation on mice, Aitken suggested that
one possible implication of his findings is that the EMF link to childhood leukemia seen in residential epidemiological studies may in fact be due to their fathers' radiation exposure. He picks up this theme in his new
PLoS ONE paper:
"[T]he fact that sperm DNA is damaged by this form of radiation has additional implications for the health and wellbeing of
children born to fathers who have experienced high levels of occupational or environmental exposure to RF-EMR around the
time of conception."
See also August 17 post.
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