A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

John Boice: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )

June 11, 2019

Hans Skovgaard Poulsen sounded the alarm seven years ago. There’s a spike in glioblastoma —GBM— in Denmark, he warned. Poulsen, the head of neuro-oncology at Copenhagen University Hospital, called it “frightening.”

On November 2, 2012, the Danish Cancer Society dutifully sent out a press advisory under the title “...

May 25, 2016

Cell Phone Radiation Boosts Cancer Rates in Animals;$25 Million NTP Study Finds Brain Tumors

The cell phone cancer controversy will never be the same again.

The U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) is expected to issue a public announcement that cell phone radiation presents a cancer risk for humans. The move comes soon after its recently completed study showed statistically significant increases in cancer among rats that had been exposed to GSM or CDMA signals for two-years.

Discussions are currently underway among federal agencies on how to inform the public about the new findings. NTP senior managers believe that these results should be released as soon as possible because just about everyone is exposed to wireless radiation all the time and therefore everyone is potentially at risk.

January 13, 2016

NCRP Pressured CDC To Remove Cell Phone Safety Advice

The NCRP was the driving force behind the removal of cautionary advice in a CDC fact sheet on cell phone use. Senior officials at the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements pressured the Centers for Disease Control into deleting the cautionary language in August 2014.

The NCRP is an influential policy-setting group, chartered by the U.S. Congress to serve the public health.

January 1, 2016

New York Times Looks Behind CDC Reversal on Cell Phone Risks

In August 2014, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued and then rescinded precautionary advice on the use of cell phones. See our story, “CDC Calls for Caution on Cell Phones, Then Gets Cold Feet.”

Today,* Danny Hakim, an investigative reporter at the New York Times, has published a behind-the-scenes look at what was going on at the time, based on more than 500 pages of CDC internal documents, including e-mails, together with follow-up interviews. His story,...

November 3, 2011

The Danish Cohort Study:The Politics and Economics of Bias

The latest update of the Danish cell phone-cancer study is being touted as the biggest and best ever. It shows “no link between mobile phone use and [brain] tumors,” according to the press release.

Don’t believe a word of it.

On October 20, the British Medical Journal released the third installment of the Danish Cancer Society’s cohort study, which has been tracking some 400,000 mobile phones subscribers since the 1980s. The whole enterprise has been dogged by controversy and political suspicions since the first results were published ten years ago.

July 29, 2011

Two Questions about the CEFALO Children’s Cell Phone Study

We pose two questions about the new children’s study on cell phone tumor risks, known as CEFALO:

(1) How many of the health and science reporters who filed stories actually read the paper beyond the press release and abstract? An even cursory look at the paper would have tipped them off that there was something systematically wrong with the data. Yet, practically...

January 16, 2009

No Risk of Eye Cancer

Cell phones do not increase the risk of developing eye cancer, at least for the first ten years of use, according to a group of German researchers led by Andreas Stang at the Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg in Halle. This marks a reversal. Eight years ago, Stang reported a possible association in a smaller and less detailed study (see MWN, J/F01, p.9).

December 6, 2006

John Boice: There's Nothing To Worry About

IEI's John Boice, a member of the Danish-American research team that released the new cell phone epi study yesterday, told the Associated Press: "There's really no biological basis for you to be concerned about radio waves. Nonetheless, people are." We wonder why Boice discounts the many reports of RF-induced genetic damage. Surely they qualify as a justifiable reason to be concerned about long-term exposure to cell phone radiation.