A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

News & Comment

Thursday, July 22, 2004

When three cases of male breast cancer showed up in the same small office in Albuquerque in 2001, a lawsuit was quickly filed. “The odds of three men in one specific office getting breast cancer are a trillion to one,” said Sam Bregman, the plaintiffs’ attorney. He argued that the cancers were caused, at least in part, by EMFs from an electrical vault that was next to the basement office where the men worked.

France Telecom's Joe Wiart Shows Kids Get Twice as Much

Thursday, July 22, 2004

The brains of young children absorb twice as much as RF energy from a cell phone as those of adults, according to a set of new calculations carried out by Joe Wiart's research group at France Telecom in the suburbs of Paris.

Controlling Research, Setting Standards and Spinning History

Thursday, July 1, 2004

If you had any doubts that the wireless industry is in total control of the RF health debate, you need only to have gone to the workshop held at the FCC’s Washington headquarters on June 28. By the end of the day, the fog would have lifted.

Motorola’s Joe Elder told the assembled delegates from the U.S., the EU, Japan and Korea that the health issue is just about settled. There is no credible evidence that casts doubt on the current 4 W/Kg threshold for ill effects from mobile phone radiation, he said.

Thursday, June 10, 2004

The U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) was ready to spend some $10 million on RF research, but no one wanted it. In February, the NTP issued a request for proposals to carry out a number of animal studies on the possible cancer risks associated with wireless communications. Not a single lab responded by the April 8 deadline. 

Thursday, June 10, 2004

The Swiss Research Foundation on Mobile Communications, based in Zurich, is asking for proposals for research on a host of EMF related topics, including health and safety studies, dosimetry projects and work on risk perception. 

Pages

Short Takes

IARC Publishes Rationale for RF as
Possible Human Carcinogen

April 19, 2013

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has released its detailed evaluation of the cancer risks associated with RF radiation, which serves as the rationale for designating RF as a possible human carcinogen.

The IARC monograph comes close to two years after an invited panel of experts from 14 countries reached this conclusion following an eight-day meeting at IARC headquarters in Lyon, France (see our...

Continues

FCC Begins Review of Its RF Safety Rules 

March 29, 2013

Today, the FCC —finally— issued a package of rules and requests for information related to RF health and safety. We say finally because the commission announced that this was on its way last June (see "What's Up at the FCC?"). No one at the FCC is eager to say why it took so long, except that it covers a lot of ground.

The document is indeed long (over 200 pages) and...

Continues

Plus Ça Change…

December 4, 2012

Another in our continuing series  —Nothing Ever Really Changes. 

We recently came across an item in the January 20, 1964 issue of Newsweek titled, "The Mrs. G Effect" about a California housewife, who could hear noises that no one else could hear.

An "expert" was brought in. As far as he could tell, Mrs. G was converting alternating current fields into sound signals "as though she were a radio receiver." Newsweek also talked to Allan Frey who offered qualified support. "If you use the correct frequency and modulate it properly, it's easy to induce...

Continues

Buddy, Can You Spare $25,000?

November 30, 2012

EPRI, the research arm of the electric utility industry, has just published what might be a very useful report. Unfortunately, most of us will never get to see it.

The report is an evaluation of consumer-grade RF exposure meters —the type of instrument you might use to measure radiation levels from a cell tower or a smart meter. In a short abstract, which is publicly available, EPRI states, "Consumers need to recognize that each [RF...

Continues

All Short Takes...