Germany

January 10, 2022

Leif Salford celebrated his 80^th birthday on December 7. An emeritus professor at Sweden’s Lund University and a noted neurosurgeon, Salford spent much of his career treating patients with brain tumors. Over the years, he became frustrated as, all too often, he was unable to save them with a scalpel.

In 1987, Salford came across a paper in Neuroscience Letters from a group at the University of Western Ontario, who had found that rats undergoing the equivalent of a routine MRI scan showed changes in their blood-brain barrier. The BBB is a membrane that keeps potentially toxic substances in the bloodstream from getting into the brain. It’s not a perfect barrier —it can leak. The Canadians reported that something about the electromagnetic exposures during the MRI scan had increased the permeability of the rats’ BBB. It had become more porous.

If microwaves used in the MRI were responsible, Salford thought....

February 8, 2021

German Court Moves To SilenceRelentless Critic of RF DNA Studies

A German court of appeals has ordered Alexander Lerchl to stop smearing the authors of two papers which show that mobile phone radiation can break DNA and possibly cause cancer. For more than a decade, Lerchl, a professor of biology at Jacobs University in Bremen, has charged, without evidence, that the experimental data from Hugo Rüdiger’s lab at the Medical University of Vienna (MUV) were fabricated.

In its long-awaited decision, dated December 11, 2020, and released at the end of January, the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court of Bremen threatened Lerchl with a fine of up to €250,000 (~US$300,000), or six months in prison, if he continues to falsely disparage the Rüdiger papers. The penalties would apply each time Lerchl violates the court order. Lerchl must also pay €20,000 in court costs.

June 25, 2020

ICNIRP’s Principal Patron: Germany

The German government is the main sponsor of ICNIRP, the International Commission for Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection.

The Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU), which is the bureaucratic parent of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS), has contributed 70-80% of ICNIRP’s annual income in each of the last three years. This...

The German government is the main sponsor of ICNIRP, the International Commission for Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection.

February 16, 2017

“RF Radiation Injures Trees Around Mobile Phone Base Stations,” Science for the Total Environment, December 1, 2016.

“We found a high-level damage in trees within the vicinity of phone masts.” From a German-Spanish team.

December 1, 2014

No Cancer Risk from Power Lines, Says the New York Times

”Still worried about power lines and cancer? That’s so retro, says the New York Times. You’re just stuck in the 1980’s.

This is what the “newspaper of record” wants you to know about the risk of childhood leukemia from power lines: A “fairly broad consensus among researchers holds that no significant threat to public health has materialized.”

The full message is told in a new 7+ minute video, produced by the Times’ RetroReport, which boasts a staff of 13 journalists and 10 contributors, led by Kyra Darnton. The video even credits a fact checker. What was missing is the common sense to do some digging when reporting on a controversial issue.

July 26, 2013

“Genotoxic Effects of Exposure to RF-EMF in HL-60 Cells Are Not Reproducible,” Mutation Research/Genetic Toxicology and Environmental Mutagenesis, posted online June 28, 2013, by a German team including Günter Speit and Rudolf Tauber.

“In conclusion, two independent attempts failed to reproduce genotoxic effects of RF-EMF in HL-60 cells as reported by the REFLEX project. These repeat experiments were performed under the same experimental conditions as the original experiments and one part of the repeat study was performed by the scientists who also generated the REFLEX data.”

June 3, 2008

3G Radiation Can Promote Tumors

Chronic exposure to 3G (UMTS) cell phone radiation can promote the growth of tumors, according to a new animal study presented at a workshop in Berlin last week. This finding is "remarkable," according to the lead researcher, Thomas Tillmann of the Fraunhofer Institute of Toxicology and Experimental Medicine (ITEM) in Hannover, Germany. At this point, only the conference abstract is available (p.10).

January 30, 2008

Set Interphone Free

It's time to end the deadlock. It's time to release the results of the Interphone study, the largest and most expensive cell phone epidemiological study ever attempted. Any further delay would be close to scandalous.

A draft of the final paper with the combined data from the 13 participating countries was completed close to two years ago. One member of the Interphone team —Canada's Dan Krewski— has said that the holdup is due to disagreements over editing the manuscript, that is, changing a comma here or a comma there. We doubt that what's going on. Krewski told us this close to six months ago and the paper has still not been submitted for publication.

September 26, 2007

Can Birds "See" the Earth's Magnetic Field?

Birds may actually be able to "see" a magnetic field. This is the fascinating and surprising conclusion of a group of German scientists who have been studying migratory birds. Not everyone is yet convinced that garden warblers can visualize the geomagnetic field (see today's news item on Nature.com), but the new German paper reminds us how little about we know about how living systems interact with electromagnetic signals.

February 5, 2007

German Radiation Officials Advise Caution

The German Federal Office of Radiation Protection (BfS) has joined its Swedish counterpart in advising caution with respect to the use of mobile phones, following the release of the new Interphone brain tumor paper

January 29, 2006

Is There a Ten-Year Latency for Cell Phone Tumor Development?

Is it a warning sign or a statistical fluke?

This is the question prompted by a new epidemiological study, released on Friday (January 27) which shows —once again— that one may be more than twice as likely to develop certain types of tumors after using a cell phone for more than ten years.

February 1, 2004

It’s Genetics, Stupid

Wolfgang Löscher has suffered numerous personal attacks for his work on EMFs and breast cancer. But he struggled on, and now he may have resolved a fundamental problem in EMF research: Why different labs doing what appear to be identical experiments, produce conflicting results.

January 27, 2004

German Radar Workers' Claims Move Forward

A court in El Paso, TX, ruled on January 26 that German soldiers who developed cancer after being exposed to X-ray radiation from radar components can pursue their claims against the manufacturers of the equipment, according to the German edition of the Deutsche Welle. The defendants include GE, Raytheon and Lucent.

"Gene Expression in the Mammary Gland Tissue of Female Fischer 344 and Lewis Rats After Magnetic Field Exposure (50 Hz, 100 μT) for Two Weeks,"

International Journal of Radiation Biology, February 28, 2012. From Löscher's lab in Germany.

A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

Germany: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )