conflict of interest: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )

”A few days ago, I received an urgent warning from a longtime contact in Sweden. An industry associate had told him that the U.S. National Toxicology Program’s study on cell phone cancer risks was screwed up and essentially “useless.”

I was tempted to disregard it as nothing more than a corporate delusion. But the original source was said to be Maria Feychting, a professor at the Karolinska Institute and the vice chair of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP). She had cast doubt on the landmark $25 million NTP RF–animal study in a talk presented at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences —the institute that awards the Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry every year.

I decided I had to check out the rumor.

“Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents,“ JAMA Internal Medicine, published online September 12, 2016.

“This historical account of industry efforts demonstrates the importance of having reviews written by people without conflicts of interest and the need for financial disclosure.” From Stanton Glantz’s Center for Tobacco Research. Open access. More than 10 years ago the electric utility industry paid Leeka Kheifets $50,000 for a literature review.

“Influence of Author’s Affiliation and Funding Sources on the Results of Cohort Studies on Occupational Cancer,” American Journal of Industrial Medicine, March 2016.

“Our study demonstrated that the cohort studies on occupational exposures and cancer published by authors belonging to the private sector (industry or consultant), or funded by the private sector, concluded significantly less often that an excess of risk of cancer was found than those published by authors affiliated to universities or public institutions. Furthermore, private authors more frequently downplayed the risk in the Conclusion section of the abstract, as compared to the Results section, than public authors did.”

“Time To Turn the Tide: WHO’s Engagement with Non-State Actors and the Politics of Stakeholder Governance and Conflicts of Interest,” (letter), British Medical Journal, May 19, 2014.

Judith Richter of the University of Zurich’s Center for Ethics, asks: “Why do member states find it acceptable that an international public agency can be funded by corporate donors?” See also her related commentary in Social Medicine.

“Lo Scienziato che Perdona il Diesel e la Diossina,”  (in Italian: The scientist who forgives diesel and dioxin.) lI Venerdi, La Repubblica’s magazine (No.1354), February 28, 2014, pp.48- 51.

Riccardo Staglianò profiles Paolo Boffetta, “The Devil’s Advocate,” currently the director of the Institute for Translational Epidemiology at Mount SInai Hospital in New York City.

Last year, sensing that the upcoming IARC assessment might undercut his legacy at both the WHO and ICNIRP, Mike Repacholi assembled a team to prepare its own assessment of the possible tumor risks from RF radiation: That review has just been released...

When we wrote (September 21) that conflicts of interest among journal editors are not being addressed, we were neglecting the case of Charles Nemeroff, the editor-in-chief of Neuropsychopharmacology. Nemeroff is the chairman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University medical school in Atlanta.

As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this summer, a favorable review by Nemeroff of a device to treat depression, published in Neuropsychopharmacology, failed to disclose his ties to Cyberonics, the manufacturer of the device. The fact that his six academic coauthors had ties to Cyberonics, as the medical journal later revealed, was also left unmentioned; the eighth coauthor works at the company.

There’s an old English saying that goes “He who pays the piper calls the tune.”

This also applies to cell-phone health studies according to a new analysis by a team from Switzerland’s University of Basel. In a paper accepted for publication in Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP), Matthias Egger and Martin Röösli and coworkers found that: “Studies exclusively funded by industry reported the largest number of outcomes but were least likely to report a statistically significant result...compared to studies funded by public agencies or charities.”

Their analysis is based on 59 experimental studies published between 1995 and 2005. They note that a majority (68%) of these studies reported biological effects. Egger and Röösli advise that “the interpretation of the results from existing and future studies of the health effects of [RF] radiation should take sponsorship into account.”