A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

2023 Articles

Author of “The Zapping of America” and “Currents of Death” Among Many Other Books

August 10, 2023
Last updated August 20, 2023

Paul Brodeur, a seminal voice in publicizing asbestos and electromagnetic radiation health risks, died August 2 on Cape Cod, MA, at the age of 92. For close to 40 years, Brodeur was a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, where many of his exposés first appeared before he expanded them into books.

In December 1976, the New Yorker ran Brodeur’s two-part article on microwave radiation. It would become a sensation in the otherwise insular world of electromagnetic health that up to then had been dominated by military and industrial interests. The following year, Brodeur published The Zapping of America.

The Lai-Singh DNA Breaks 30 Years On
A Conversation with Henry Lai

June 12, 2023

Unremarkable science can sometimes tell a remarkable story. Two papers that were published in the last few weeks —and passed mostly unnoticed— have important, though very different, backstories.

One offers a surprising glimpse of change in the usually static field of RF research, while the other shows how much has stayed the same over the last many years.

Yet, in the end, they offer the same well-worn message, always worth repeating: Those who sign the checks, run the show.

The two papers come 30 years after Henry Lai and N.P. Singh began an experiment at the University of Washington in Seattle that would set off alarm bells across the still-young cell phone industry —and the U.S. military. Lai and Singh would show that a single, two-hour exposure to low-level microwave radiation (today, we’d say RF) could lead to breaks in the helical strands of DNA in the brains of live rats.

Twenty-Two Years and Counting

May 4, 2023
Last updated August 31, 2023

In a big win for the telecoms, and Motorola in particular, a judge has disallowed testimony from the entire slate of expert witnesses who were scheduled to support claims that cell phones can lead to brain tumors.

Judge Alfred Irving Jr. of the Washington DC Superior Court issued the ruling on April 25 in a set of 13 cases collectively known as Murray v Motorola.

The Murray litigation has been going on for a long, long time —think Jarndyce. The original claim was filed more than 20 years ago.

Why Don’t the Tenets of Toxicology Apply?

February 28, 2023

The precautionary principle should be applied to public exposures to RF radiation. So say four senior academic scientists —including the former director of the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP)— in a strongly worded appeal, published today.

Writing in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research, Paul Ben Ishai, Linda Birnbaum, Devra Davis and Hugh Taylor point to a “plethora of both experimental and epidemiological evidence establishing a causal relationship between EMF and cancer and other adverse health effects.”