NIEHS: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )

The Washington Post's health section offers its take on the cell phone–tumor story today. In "Not Exactly a Ringing Endorsement," reporter John Donnelly presents a variety of opinions from DC area residents: "Everything is a risk. I'm a bodyguard. That's risky. You got to have a life. Cell phones don't scare me," said one. "It makes me nervous," said a pregnant 26-year-old, "I use the speakerphone as much as I can. I keep it away from my body. I try to use it very little."

A number of mainstream newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal and the Seattle Post Intelligencer, have picked up the NIEHS–EPRI story on their Web sites (see our September 5 post). The PI's Andrew Schneider reports that some at NIEHS are "outraged" by the tie-in with EPRI.

Just months after leaving his post as the head of the EMF project at the World Health Organization (WHO), Mike Repacholi is now in business as an industry consultant. The Connecticut Light and Power Co. (CL&P), a subsidiary of Northeast Utilities, and the United Illuminating Co. (UI) have hired Repacholi to help steer the Connecticut Siting Council away from a strict EMF exposure standard.

The siting council is in the process of revising the state's EMF policies. Last year, it hired its own consultant, Peter Valberg of the Gradient Corp., to review the current state of EMF health research. Valberg's report, submitted in January, proposes a "screening level" of 100 mG to protect against any adverse health effects "even in a hypothetically more sensitive sub-population" —that is, it would also protect young children. (What's a screening level? See below.)

The U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) was ready to spend some $10 million on RF research, but no one wanted it. In February, the NTP issued a request for proposals to carry out a number of animal studies on the possible cancer risks associated with wireless communications. Not a single lab responded by the April 8 deadline. 

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.

Environmental Health Perspectives is now an open access journal. This means that all research articles in EHP, which is published by the NIEHS, are feely accessible on the Internet.

Among the more than 10,000 research reports now available is the startling paper by the Lund University group in Sweden showing that very weak GSM mobile phone radiation can cause leakage through the blood-brain barrier, leading to neurological damage. The  Lund paper appeared in EHP’s June 2003 issue and was posted on the Web last January (see MWN, J/F03). The studies on the blood-brain barrier by Lund’s Drs. Leif Salford and Bertil Persson prompted a workshop held in Germany in November. Microwave News was there and we will be posting a report on the meeting soon.