Witness List for Senate Cell Phone Hearing

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.

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.