A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

Linda Birnbaum: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )

January 19, 2024

UPDATE 2
IARC has announced that the agency will evaluate the cancer risks of “automotive gasoline and some oxygenated additives” from February 25 to March 4, 2025. The reassesssment of RF radiation will have to wait.

October 25, 2023
UPDATE 1
Other Monograph meetings have now been scheduled for March, June and November 2024. The next possible slot for RF radiation is in early 2025.

December 12, 2022

On November 23, 2002, Elisabete Weiderpass, the Director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), revealed that a new assessment of the evidence linking radiofrequency (RF) radiation to cancer would likely take place in early 2024. A formal decision could come within a few months.

Calls for a new IARC evaluation have been mounting for some years following the release of two large animal studies showing elevated tumor counts after lifelong exposure to RF radiation. Many believe that the animal experiments leave the Agency little choice but to increase the cancer risk classification at least one notch to “probable” from the current “possible,” or perhaps to its highest classification, a known human carcinogen.

But, as Weiderpass made clear on making the announcement at a conference in Paris, the RF–cancer risk might instead be downgraded and the “possible” classification removed.

The stakes are high.

October 8, 2023

In the summer of 2012, Paul Brodeur sent me an email that began, “Don’t forget that when I croak, you’re supposed to give some credit to me as the original microwave pioneer.” I came across it in my files after learning that Brodeur had died on August 2nd at the age of 92. It was among his many letters, notes and clippings I had stashed away over the last 50 years.

The story begins on a rainy fall afternoon in 1977 at the New York office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a public-interest environmental law firm, where I was working at the time. Brodeur, then a star investigative reporter at The New Yorker, came by with copies of his new book, The Zapping of America, an exposé on the dangers of microwave radiation and how they were being covered up. The previous December, the magazine had run two long articles by Brodeur which caused a national sensation and drew attention to the otherwise obscure world of electromagnetic health.

March 30, 2023

A newly declassified, though heavily redacted, report from the intelligence community has put renewed emphasis on the possibility that the condition known as “Havana Syndrome” could be caused by pulsed RF energy.

“Electromagnetic energy, particularly pulsed signals in the radiofrequency range, plausibly explains the core characteristics [of Havana Syndrome, also called ‘anomalous health incidents’] although information gaps exist,” the intelligence panel concluded.

March 22, 2023

“Wireless Technologies, Non-Ionizing EMFs and Children: Identifying and Reducing Health Risks,” Current Problems in Pediatric and Adolescent Health Care, March 23, 2023. “We conclude that consistent with advice in pediatric radiology, an approach that recommends that microwave radiation exposures be As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) seems sensible and prudent.” Open access. Last month, many of the same authors recommended precauction in a separate paper. This paper runs 49 pages and is open access.

 

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.”

November 10, 2022

“How the FCC Shields Cellphone Companies from Safety Concerns,” ProPublica, November 10, 2022. By Peter Elkind. “The wireless industry is rolling out thousands of new transmitters amid a growing body of research that calls cellphone safety into question. Federal regulators say there’s nothing to worry about — even as they rely on standards established in 1996.” Also Elkind’s: “The Girl Scouts’ Latest Business Project: Hailing 5G Cellphone Technology,” ProPublica December 9, 2022.

January 25, 2022

Senior environmental health scientists are calling for JAMA Oncology to retract a review of RF radiation and cancer by David Robert Grimes, a physicist at Dublin City University.*

Grimes’s paper, which was posted on the journal’s website on December 9th, has prompted a barrage of letters of protest to Nora Disis, the editor of JAMA Oncology.

Among those calling for retraction is Linda Birnbaum, who, for ten years, 2009-2019, was the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the National Toxicology Program (NTP). Ronald Melnick, who led the team that designed the NTP RF–cancer study, is another harsh critic.

June 11, 2021

A new analysis from the radiation group at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) calls into question the agency’s own classification of wireless radiation as a possible human carcinogen.

On May 27, IARC’s Isabelle Deltour presented the new analysis of the incidence of malignant brain tumors (glioma) in the Nordic countries —Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden— over the last several decades. She spoke at an online colloquium hosted by the German Federal Office of Radiation Protection, known as the BfS.

Deltour argued that the trends are mostly not “compatible” with those seen in the epidemiological studies —principally, Interphone and Lennart Hardell’s— that were the basis of IARC’s 2011 designation of RF radiation as a possible, or 2B, human carcinogen.

November 1, 2018

“We believe that the link between radiofrequency (RF) radiation and tumors in male rats is real,” says John Bucher, the former associate director of the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP).

The announcement accompanies this morning’s release of the NTP final reports of studies on cancer in rats and mice exposed to cell phone radiation. Bucher’s project, the largest in NTP history, cost $30 million and took more than ten years to complete.

The NTP found what it calls “clear evidence” that two different types of cell phone signals, GSM and CDMA, increased the incidence of malignant tumors in the hearts of male rats over the course of the two-year study.

February 7, 2018

Why was the NTP so ambivalent about its cell phone cancer findings at the press conference last Friday when two years ago the same scientific evidence prompted a public health warning?

Some of the pathology numbers got tweaked since they were first released in 2016, but the changes were minor. It’s the same data set —but with a very different interpretation. The NTP mindset somehow shifted from we need to release this important new health data now to this is “not a high-risk situation.”

Who or what moved the NTP managers to change their outlook? There’s no shortage of suspects and suspicions.

September 6, 2016

In May, the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) announced that male rats exposed to cell phone radiation developed higher rates of cancer. Soon, the NTP will explain how that might have happened.

The same RF/microwave radiation that led male rats to develop brain tumors also caused DNA breaks in their brains. Female rats —which did not have significant elevated tumor counts— had fewer DNA breaks.

All these findings are part of the same $25 million NTP project.

The NTP results provide “strong evidence for the genotoxicity of cell phone radiation,” Ron Melnick told Microwave News.

September 3, 2016

Video of presentation and discussion of the NTP RF study at the NTP Board of Counselors Meeting, June 2016.

Also here. Mostly Michael Wyde’s talk with important comments by NTP Director Linda Birnbaum and Associate Director John Bucher. Birnbaum calls the link between RF and Schwannomas of the heart “unequivocally clear” (@43:20-minute mark). A few minutes later, she describes it as having a “beautiful dose-relationship.” Bucher talks about the continuity in the spectrum between hyperplasia and glioma.

May 26, 2016

This evening, the National Toxicology Program (NTP) released a draft of the report on its two-year cell phone cancer study. Linda Birnbaum, the director of the NIEHS, and John Bucher, the leader of the study, will present the report at a teleconference tomorrow, Friday. They are the director and associate director of the NTP, respectively. [Birnbaum did not...

May 25, 2016

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.

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