A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

News & Comment

French TV Documentary Links IARC RF Panelist to Industry Interference

Thursday, May 19, 2011

A hard-hitting documentary aired on French television last night alleges that René de Sèze, a well-known member of the French RF community, worked to delay, if not bury, a study that would be detrimental to the mobile phone industry. The 90-minute show reports that de Sèze coordinated a study on behalf of Bouygues Telecom, a leading cell phone operator, and when the results supported a radiation health risk, he did everything he could to discredit it. De Sèze works for French National Institute for the Industrial Environment and Hazards (INERIS).

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Chinese Put Cancer of the Parotid Gland on Center Stage

Monday, April 18, 2011

Chinese researchers in Beijing are seeing some of the highest rates of cancer ever reported in any cell phone study. They have found that long-term, heavy users have rates of malignant parotid gland tumors that are seven to 13 times higher than might otherwise be expected.

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IARC Welcomes Industry to RF–Cancer Review

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has invited three industry operatives to sit in on its weeklong assessment of the cancer risks associated with exposure to wireless radiation and other sources of RF/microwave radiation. Representatives from CTIA, the Wireless Association, the Mobile Manufacturers Forum (MMF) and the GSMA will all be allowed to attend the IARC review. The meeting will be held in Lyon, France, May 24-31.

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Connecting the Dots: Putting the Volkow Brain Scans in Perspective

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

"Cell Phones Affect Brain Activity." That headline has appeared all over the world since Nora Volkow published a PET scan of a brain lit up by a cell phone last month. Her colorful graphics, published in the high impact Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), guaranteed Volkow a large and attentive audience. But all the hoopla shouldn't obscure the fact that for more than a decade many others, notably Peter Achermann's group at the University of Zurich, have shown similar types of radiation-induced changes in the brain as well as much more.

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Cell Phone Radiation Changes Brain Metabolism

Low-Level Effects Get a Boost

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

A well-regarded and influential team of researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Brookhaven National Lab (BNL) is on the brink of resolving a long-standing dispute with enormous implications for public health. In a paper due out tomorrow, Nora Volkow and coworkers are reporting that cell phone radiation can affect the normal functioning of the human brain.

Whether these short-term changes will lead to health consequences (and what they might be) is far from clear — though Volkow already has preliminary indications of a long-term effect. Nor is the mechanism of interaction yet known. But the new finding, if confirmed, would at the very least force a rethink of the prevailing orthodoxy, which maintains that low levels of RF and microwave radiation are too weak to have any effect and can be disregarded.

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ElektrosmogReport Now in English Too

February 9, 2025

Last updated March 28, 2025

One of the longest-running newsletters on the health and environmental impact of electromagnetic fields and radiation —the ElektrosmogReport— is now available in English.

Diagnose:Funk, the publisher, is translating the German-language original and making it available at no charge. Both versions come out quarterly. D:F is a consumer and environmental protection group with offices in Germany and Switzerland.

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NCI ‘Cancer Bioelectricity’ Conference

August 26, 2024

On September 12^th, the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) will host a conference on cancer bioelectricity via Zoom. Attendance is free, but registration is required.

Michael Levin, a professor of biology and biomedical engineering at Tufts University in Massachusetts, will be the keynote speaker.

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Another WHO RF Review Challenged

August 21, 2024

Last updated January 21, 2025

A third RF systematic review commissioned by the World Health Organization’s EMF Project is under fire. This one is on RF–induced oxidative stress.

Last month, two other WHO reviews —on pregnancy outcomes and on tinnitus— were both called into question as critics called for them to be retracted.

A team of 14 from six countries, led by Felix Meyer of the German Office for Radiation Protection (BfS), identified 11,599 studies on oxidative stress in the frequency range 800-2450 MHz. They then eliminated 11,543 of them as not meeting their criteria for inclusion.

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Italy’s 6 V/m RF Limit at Risk

March 14, 2024

The International Commission on the Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields (ICBE-EMF) has written to Italian government officials to support the country’s strict 6 V/m RF exposure limit.

The letter, dated March 13, expresses “great concern” that the standard might be weakened. It is signed by Ronald Melnick, the chair of ICBE-EMF, and by Elizabeth Kelley, its managing director.

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“NTP Lite”: Update from Japan

March 12, 2024

The Japanese group running a partial repeat of the NTP RF cancer study has not observed genotoxic effects among male rats exposed to 900 MHz CDMA radiation at 4 W/Kg, according to a paper to be presented tomorrow at the annual meeting of the Society of Toxicology in Salt Lake City, UT (SOT2024).

The analysis of the cancer data is ongoing and will not be reported.

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Schwannoma Puzzle

September 14, 2023

Last updated September 16, 2023

Three medical doctors have published a case report of a 40-year-old Italian man who developed a tumor in his thigh, near where he “habitually” kept his smartphone in a trouser pocket.

The case was published at the end of August in Radiology Case Reports, a peer-reviewed, open access journal.

The tumor, a painless mass, gradually expanded in the man’s left thigh over a period of six months, they wrote.

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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.
“Smart Skin Enables Magnetoreception,” The Scientist, September 2016. “It would truly be a sixth-sense technology.”
“Increasing Incidence of Thyroid Cancer in the Nordic Countries with Main Focus on Swedish Data,” BMC Cancer, July 7, 2016. New from Lennart Hardell’s group in Sweden. “With the emergence of the smartphones in the mid and late 2000s, the internal antenna location started to shift from the top of the phone to the bottom of the phone.” This would entail greater RF exposure of the thyroid gland than earlier phones. (Open access) … In a report issued on August 18, IARC maintains that, “the growing epidemic of thyroid cancer reported in recent decades in several high-income countries is largely due to overdiagnosis.” Read the IARC press release here. We asked Hardell whether the IARC analysis changed his outlook on the possible role played by smart phones. “No,” he replied.
“EUROPAEM EMF Guideline 2016 for the Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of EMF-Related Health Problems and Illnesses,” Reviews on Environmental Health, posted online July 25, 2016. Open access.
“NTP Toxicology and Carcinogenicity Studies of Cell Phone RF Radiation”; Michael Wyde’s PowerPoint presentation at the BioEM2016 meeting in Ghent, Belgium, June 8, 2016. Covers pathology, survival and genetic toxicology results.
“Mechanosensory Hairs in Bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) Detect Weak Electric Fields,” PNAS, posted online May 31, 2016. Open access.
“Synergism Between Sinusoidal 50 Hz Magnetic Field and Formaldehyde in Triggering Carcinogenic Effects in Male [SD] Rats,” American Journal of Industrial Medcine, posted online May 24, 2016. “Life-span exposure to MF and formaldehyde induces statistically significant carcinogenic effects in male rats.” From the Ramazzini Institute in Bologna. See also our detailed report on the same project.
“Magnetic Correlates in EM Consciousness,” Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine, posted online April 6, 2016. The latest paper from Abe Liboff in which he examines the hypothesis that “consciousness is a manifestation of the EM field,” based on evidence that “living tissue is ultrasensitive to ultrasmall (1-100 nT) [0.01-1 mG] ELF fields.”
“The Magnetic Orientation of the Antarctic Amphipod Gondogeneia antarctica Is Cancelled by Very Weak RF Field,” Journal of Experimental Biology, published online March 2016. “The results of our experiments suggest the remarkable sensitivity … of the Antarctic amphipod … Even 2 nT RF regardless of frequency was able to disrupt orientation.” (1-10 MHz)
“Financial Conflicts of Interest and Study Results in Environmental and Occupational Health Research,” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, March 2016. “[F]inancial relationships are clearly associated with the direction of reported scientific findings.”

A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

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