July 3… Exposures to ambient magnetic fields may affect the quality of human sperm and may well explain its well-documented decline over the last few decades. De-Kun Li, an epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, CA, has found that daily exposures of only 1.6mG or higher for at least two-and-a-half hours were associated with significantly poorer semen quality. Men who were exposed to over 1.6mG for over six hours a day were four times more likely to have substandard sperm.

"The longer you are exposed, the higher the risk," Li told Microwave News. He presented these new findings last week at the annual meeting of the Society for Epidemiologic Research, held in Chicago. He has submitted them for publication.

"If it holds up, this would be very important because magnetic field exposures are ubiquitous," Li said. "We know that sperm quality has been going down for a long time with the largest declines in urban areas. That would be consistent with EMF exposures which are highest in cities."

The quality of the semen was assessed according to WHO criteria for motility and morphology —that is, the ability of sperm to "swim" (to the egg) and their shape. "Sperm quality could turn out to be a sensitive endpoint to study the biological effects of EMFs," Li said.

Li is one of the few to explore new ways of defining what is a biologically significant dose of EMFs. An important implication of his new study is that while he might classify a man as being in a "high" exposure group, that same man could still have a time-weighted, 24-hour average exposure of less than 1mG, which would put him in the "unexposed" group in most past studies. Such a misclassification would reduce the chances of seeing this effect.

In a study published in 2002, Li showed that women exposed above a certain threshold (16mG) had higher rates of miscarriages (see MWN, J/F02, p.1). At the time, many considered that this new concept of EMF dose was worth pursuing. But, in fact, no one did —at least no one has yet published a follow-up study. "In that earlier study we saw higher miscarriage risks among women who had an exposure of more than 16mG at least once a day," Li said, "in our new study, men had poorer sperm quality if they were exposed to a much lower field but it had to be for at least 10% of the day."

The power-frequency fields implicated in this new study are extremely weak. They are approximately 1,000 times lower than the current ICNIRP guidelines and some three times lower than what many see as the threshold for increasing the risk of childhood leukemia (3-4mG). According to a large-scale survey carried out a decade ago, close to 15% of the U.S. population is exposed to an average of more than 2mG over a 24-hour period (see MWN, M/J98, p.4).

   Download a pdf of our May/June 2008 “News & Comment”

June 29… The delay in the release of the results of the Interphone project is getting wider and wider attention. The International Herald Tribune will feature a story, "Rift Delays Official Release of Study on Safety of Cell Phones," tomorrow, Monday, June 30 —with a blurb for the piece on the front pages of both the European and Asian editions.

Interphone: The Cracks Begin To Show

  Download a pdf of this news and comment

June 19… The divisions within the Interphone project are coming out into the open. As the delay in releasing the final results approaches the three-year mark, the tensions within the study team are no longer much of a secret. It's even becoming clearer who is in which camp —who believes that cell phones present a tumor risk and who thinks the phones are safe.

All this came into focus at last week's Bioelectromagnetics Society (BEMS) annual meeting in San Diego, which featured a panel discussion on cell phones and brain tumors, with special emphasis on the 13-country, $15-plus million Interphone epidemiological study of tumors among users of mobile phones. Near the end of the two-plus-hour session, ex-Motorola staffer Mays Swicord came to the microphone and, with a single word, voiced the question on everyone's mind. "When?" he asked Elisabeth Cardis, the head of Interphone. She replied with what has become her trademark answer: "Soon, I hope." Last March, Cardis left the International Agency for Research in Cancer (IARC) to join the Center for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL) in Barcelona.

Outside the meeting room, Sweden's Lennart Hardell spoke about the delays at Interphone: "It's not fair to public health to withhold the Interphone results, after all the public paid for most of it." In his BEMS presentation, Hardell concluded that his own studies show a "consistent pattern of increased risk for glioma and acoustic neuroma after ten years." He noted that he believes that a ten-year tumor latency is the "minimum" —that is, the observed risks are likely to grow larger in the years ahead.

Not long after arriving in San Diego, we heard that some progress had been made: A new draft of the final Interphone paper has been completed and was being reviewed by the research teams in all 13 countries. Cardis later confirmed this to Microwave News, but she was quick to add that other "final" versions had circulated in the past. When asked whether she was pleased with this latest draft, Cardis declined to offer an opinion. Maria Feychting, who is leading the Swedish Interphone group, also refused to comment. Germany's Joachim Schüz (now in Denmark) was less reticent. "I am very happy where we are now," he told us. "We are extremely close." No one was yet willing to predict when the final Interphone paper would finally be submitted to a journal for publication.

A three-member committee made up of Finland's Anssi Auvinen, Canada's Jack Siemiatycki and New Zealand's Alistair Woodward assembled the most recent draft of the Interphone paper. The project teams in Canada and New Zealand have not yet revealed their own findings, preferring instead to present their results in the joint 13-country paper. The Finnish group reported its data as part of a joint analysis with those from four other Interphone countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the U.K.). Together they reported an elevated risk for brain tumors and acoustic neuroma among long-term cell-phone users.

Even as a new consensus draft has emerged, the split within the project has become move visible. A number of sources close to the project revealed that Feychting, who served as the chair and moderator of the BEMS session, is firmly in the "there is no risk" group, as are Schüz together with Canada's Dan Krewski and U.K.'s Tony Swerdlow. They argue that any observed associations pointing to an elevated tumor risks are more likely due to biases inherent in the study design. For instance, people may say that they used a cell phone on the side of their head with the tumor, even if this were not the case, in order to rationalize how and why they got the tumor.

The opposing group says that higher tumor risks are showing up and precautionary measures are called for. This faction includes Israel's Siegal Sadetzki and Australia's Bruce Armstrong, who have already made their views public (see our April 28 post).

One insider confided that things have gotten so bad that some members of the Interphone project are no longer talking to each other and this has added to the delay in publishing the final results. "As a result of the animosity between the factions, scientists and the public at large are being denied this important data," that person said. "It's a tragedy to me."

Cardis has been careful not to publicly reveal where she herself stands. That is until this week —immediately after the BEMS meeting— when she endorsed a set of precautionary measures. In an interview published on Monday in Le Monde, arguably France's leading newspaper, Cardis said that she is in general agreement with those who argue against the use of cell phones by children under the age of 12 and in favor of the use of hands-free sets. "In the absence of definitive results and in the light of a number of studies which, though limited, suggest a possible effect of radiofrequency radiation, precautions are important," Cardis told Le Monde. "I am therefore globally in agreement with the idea of restricting the use of children, though I would not go as far as banning mobile phones," Cardis added. (She provided Microwave News with a translation of her comments to Le Monde.)

Cardis was responding to an "Appeal" for caution in the use of mobile phones, issued last Sunday, June 15, by 20 cancer and public health specialists in the Journal du Dimanche, another well-read newspaper. Among the 20 are Henri Pujol, a past president of the La Ligue Nationale Contre le Cancer, the French counterpart to the American Cancer Society, and Annie Sasco, a former head of epidemiology for cancer prevention at IARC. The Appeal received widespread coverage in the French media —so much so that it prompted the French National Academy of Medicine to issue a "clarification" yesterday in an effort to quell the growing public controversy. The academy stated that the results of the Interphone study that had been published so far are "reassuring" and, in a jab at the group of 20, reminded everyone that medicine is not about advertising or marketing.

David Servan-Schreiber, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and a lecturer at the medical school in Lyon, was the force behind the Appeal. "I gathered a group of experts in order to respond to the questions I was getting every week in my talks and on my Web site," he told Microwave News. Servan-Schreiber criticized the Academy of Medicine for its well-known "aversion to any environmental causes of cancer." "[Its] argument that existing cell phone studies warrant continuing use without precautions just doesn't make sense scientifically. This is all quite appalling," he said.

The group of 20 presented a list of ten recommendations on how to practice precaution. In addition to limiting the use of cell phones by children and endorsing the use of a hands-free set, these include picking a low SAR phone, keeping cell phones away from your body, using a landline whenever possible and favoring text messages over making a call. The full text of the Appeal is available here.

June 13… In a follow-up to her column, "Experts Revive Debate Over Cellphones and Cancer," published last week, Tara Parker-Pope, a health reporter at the New York Times, invited Louis Slesin, the editor of Microwave News, to talk about cell phones, radiation exposures (SARs) and the growing concerns over tumor risks. You can listen to the eight-and-a half-minute conversation on the Times Web site. You can also add your comments to the more than 180 that have already been posted on the Times blog, "How Much Radiation Does Your Phone Emit?"

June 6… Frank Barnes of the University of Colorado in Boulder is calling for more studies on the effects of cell phones on children. "There are definitely unknowns and there are definitely experiments that have been done —including some in my own lab— where I clearly don't know what the implications are biologically," he told KCNC, the CBS TV station in Denver. "What we don't know is what long-term exposures may or may not do," he said. Barnes chaired the National Academy of Sciences' panel, which issued a report on health research needs for RF radiation earlier this year (see our January 17 post). One youngster who was also interviewed admitted that she uses her phone "every minute constantly," adding, "I am basically addicted."

June 4… It was a "mistake," says Anders Ahlbom. That's how he explains why his "expert group" left out the Lahkola study from its report on important EMF developments in 2007 for SSI, the Swedish Radiation Protection Authority (see our March 14 post). The Lahkola study points to a significant increased risk of brain tumors among long-term cell phone users in five countries participating in the Interphone project. This was a curious omission since two of the Lahkola coauthors helped prepare the SSI report. In a comment that has now been appended to the report, here's what Ahlbom, the chairman of the panel, wrote: "the paper was discussed by the group and was part of the basis for the conclusions. However, it was by mistake overlooked when preparing the report. The Expert Group regrets this accidental omission." What's missing is any mention at to why two other Interphone studies (from France and Israel), which showed elevated tumor risks, were also omitted from this same report.

June 3… 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). This results stands in contrast to those of the PERFORM A animal studies. (Tillmann was involved in one of the PERFORM A studies too.) Unlike the animals in the PERFORM A experiments which were restrained and under stress (see our report, "Wheel on Trial"), the mice in this new study were allowed to run free. The other crucial difference, other than the nature of the exposure signal, is that the mice in Tillmann's experiment were exposed for much longer than those in PERFORM A: 20 hours a day, seven days a week. In PERFORM A, the animals were exposed as little as one hour per day, and never more than four hours per day. Last year, in a separate study, Germany's Alex Lerchl reported no effects among lymphoma-prone mice chronically exposed to UMTS.

Today's New York Times features a column by Tara Parker-Pope on cell phones and brain tumors, "Experts Revive Debate Over Cellphones and Cancer." As of this afternoon, it is the most popular story (most e-mailed) on the Times Web site. June 4… Parker-Pope's column is still #1 today —even beating out "New Hints Seen That Red Wine May Slow Aging," which is on this morning's front page.

June 2… Editors and reviewers at Epidemiology thought long and hard before publishing the new paper suggesting that a child's behavioral problems can be traced, at least in part, to the mother's use of a cell phone use during pregnancy (see May 14 below). This comes across in an editorial by David Savitz that appears the same issue (July) as the paper. The study is "a nearly perfect recipe for 'inflammatory epidemiology'," acknowledged Savitz, an editor at the journal who has long been involved with EMF research. But, he went on, "reviewers and editors believe that these findings are worth consideration by the scientific community. The very factors that make this result potentially inflammatory also provide the justification for deciding to publish such research —the exposure is common and growing, the outcome is a public health concern, and the laboratory can provide only limited insights for extrapolation to humans." The paper's take-home message should be, according to Savitz: "No call for alarm, stay tuned."

May 31… Some news notes on the Interphone study:

• Those who say there are no long-term cell phone risks often point to the Interphone study from Japan, published earlier this year, for support. As we have previously reported, the Japanese researchers said there was no association between cell phones and brain tumors, even though they found a close to sixfold increase in glioma among heavily-exposed users after ten or more years (see our February 15 post). That link was based on a small number of cases and was not statistically significant; the Japanese attributed the increase to recall bias. Bruce Hocking, an occupational and environmental health physician in Melbourne, Australia, suggests otherwise. In a letter published this week in the British Journal of Cancer, Hocking points out that the risk of meningioma (another type of brain tumor) is hardly raised at all (OR=1.14). He writes: "If recall bias is the true explanation for the increased risk of glioma, it should similarly have affected the meningioma group, but it has not. Therefore, the increased risk in the glioma group may be a true finding."

• Siegal Sadetzki, Israel's lead Interphone investigator, continues to warn about long-term risks. "I would say our results are in line with previous results that are showing something is going wrong here," she told Tyler Hamilton of the Toronto Star. His story, "Listening to Cellphone Warnings," appears in today's editions. "After 10 years or more we do see something there," Sadetzki said. She has reported an increase in parotid gland tumors among long-term users (see "Set Interphone Free" (January 30) and our April 28 post).

• Elisabeth Cardis, the head of the Interphone study now at the Center for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL) in Barcelona, told the Star that the completed study will be submitted for publication "soon." (She has made similar predictions in the past.) On May 27, she presented her latest update on Interphone at a meeting in Copenhagen. Her PowerPoint can be downloaded here.

• And last week, a group of Interphone researchers publshed a study on the possible impact of recall bias on the study results —based on surveys in Australia, Canada and Italy. The paper appears in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, which is making the full text available at no cost.

May 29… Next-Up, the European activist group, has posted the entire Larry King Live show, "Cell Phones: Are They Dangerous?," on its Web site. Only the ads are missing. Click here to see the 44-minute video. A transcript is also available.

In addition to the guests listed in our May 27 post, below, a seventh was invited at the last minute, perhaps to balance the majority view that there may well be a health problem with long- term use of cell phones: Ted Schwartz of New York-Presbyterian Hospital — a fourth neurosurgeon. He played the role of skeptic, telling Larry King: "I really think the overwhelming amount of evidence that we have from reviewing the literature has shown there really is no good, viable link between cell phone use and brain tumors."

It's worth noting that the CTIA, the wireless trade group, declined to send anyone to be on the show. Instead, as Larry King told the viewers, CTIA referred CNN to the American Cancer Society. Like Schwartz, ACS' Michael Thun seemed well in sync with the industry position. "I think now most of the people who actually do research on brain cancer causes are very skeptical that cell phones cause brain cancer," he said. Vini Khurana, the Australian neurosurgeon, immediately responded, "I strongly disagree."

ROBERT O. BECKER, 1923-2008

May 28… Robert O. Becker, a towering figure in bioelectromagnetics, died on May 14 due to complications from pneumonia. He was 84 and had been ailing for some time. Becker, best known for his research on "currents of injury" and the role they play in regeneration, made significant contributions to many areas of electrobiology. He was later drawn into public controversies over health effects — Becker is credited as the first to use the term "electromagnetic pollution"— and in the end paid dearly for speaking out.

"Bob Becker's passing marks the end of an era in bioelectromagnetics, that time when very few scientists believed that non-thermal electromagnetic exposures were biologically significant," said Abe Liboff, a physicist and the co-editor of Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine. "All the work on applying electromagnetic fields to bone repair is attributable to Becker's reinterpretation of Carlo Matteucci's discovery of currents of injury," he said.

Andy Marino, a former graduate student of Becker's who spent 17 years in his lab, recently recalled how his mentor described what prompted him to embark on what would be his life's work:

"Salamanders have the same bones and muscles and nerves as people. If salamanders can grow new limbs, why not people? I think they can. They lack only the signal to activate cells. I was only in medical school when I thought about this, and I decided to spend my life trying to study bioelectricity and perhaps answer that question."

Marino is now a professor at the LSU Medical Center in Shreveport.

In the 1960s, at the same time that Becker was investigating the electric currents in bone with Andy Bassett, he also made some landmark observations on the effects of magnetic fields on human behavior. These studies, now all but forgotten, were years ahead of their time. For instance, in 1967, writing in Nature with Howard Friedman and Charles Bachman, Becker described how modulated magnetic fields could affect reaction times —now a hot topic among those studying cell phone radiation. Some years earlier, they found that admissions in psychiatric hospitals were associated with geomagnetic activity. Later, in a series of papers with Stephen Perry, a medical doctor in northern England, Becker and Marino linked exposures to power frequency fields to depression and suicide.

In perhaps their best-known experiment on power-line EMFs, Becker and Marino showed that mice which were exposed continuously for three generations, yielded offspring that were stunted and were generally frailer. "The results were truly startling," Marino recalled. It took a decade for EPRI, the electric utility industry research group, to repeat the multi-generation study, and the results vindicated Becker and Marino (see MWN, M/A86).

Becker's involvement with high-voltage power lines and the U.S. Navy's submarine communications system (Project Sanguine, later Project Seafarer and still later Project ELF) proved to be his undoing. He was forced into retirement at the too-young age of 56. As Becker wrote in the preface to The Electric Wilderness, a history of these struggles by Andy Marino and Joel Ray: "We faced a concerted and coordinated effort to suppress the truth which emanated from the military establishment and was simply aided and abetted by the greed of the utilities and the tarnished testimony of scientists for hire."

But even in apparent defeat, Becker made his mark and changed the course of the EMF controversy. His and Marino's fight over the 765 kV power line planned by the NY Power Authority led to the NY Power Line Project which sponsored the research that repeated Nancy Wertheimer and Ed Leeper's childhood leukemia study that forever changed the EMF landscape (see January 23 post).

After his lab at the VA Hospital in Syracuse was closed, Becker wrote The Body Electric with Gary Selden. Published in 1985, the book became a classic and is still in print today. Anyone trying to understand the forces at work in this highly politicized area of science should read his "Postscript: Political Science." Here's how it ends:

"I want the general public to know that science isn't run the way they read about it in the newspapers and magazines. I want lay people to understand that they cannot automatically accept scientists' pronouncements at face value, for too often they're self-serving and misleading. I want our citizens, nonscientists as well as investigators, to work to change the way research is administered. The way it's currently funded and evaluated, we're learning more and more about less and less, and science is becoming our enemy instead of our friend."

May 27… Larry King will devote tonight's show to a discussion on "Cell Phones: Are They Dangerous?" Among those scheduled to appear are Drs. Keith Black, the head of neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and CNN's chief medical correspondent, Vini Khurana, an Australian neurosurgeon (see April 10 below), Louis Slesin, the editor of Microwave News, and Michael Thun of the American Cancer Society.

Black treated Johnny Cochran, O.J. Simpson's attorney, who died of a brain tumor in 2005. Cochran's widow, Dale, will also be on the show. "There's a significant correlation between the side that one uses [a] cell phone on and the side that you develop the brain tumor on," Black told CNN's Gupta three years ago. Taking an opposing view was Howard Frumkin of Emory University and more recently CDC. "This is a very low probability kind of a thing approaching zero probability," Frumkin said, "There's no evidence to support the idea that Mr. Cochran's brain tumor resulted from cell phone use."

May 14… It's certainly a provocative and surprising finding —almost to the point of being unbelievable. A joint U.S.–Danish team has reported that young children born to mothers who had used cell phones during pregnancy were more likely to have behavioral disorders, such as hyperactivity and emotional problems.

Using a phone as little as two or three times a day during pregnancy was enough to trigger behavioral issues. The incidence was up to 80% higher among those children who had also used cell phones by the age of seven. The survey, carried out in 2005-06, found that 30% of Danish seven-year-olds were already using a cell phone, though less than 1% for more than one hour a week.

These new results will appear in the July issue of Epidemiology. An electronic copy of the paper has already been posted on the Internet.

What is far from clear is what type of radiation exposure, if any, the fetuses actually received. As the researchers themselves concede, "The exposure reaching the fetus (either during conversation or when the phone is in standby mode) is likely to be extremely low." An alternative explanation is that the cell phone radiation caused biochemical changes in the mother which then affected the fetus. The team notes that the vast majority of the mothers "carried their cell phones in a bag during their pregnancy" rather than on their bodies. Very few of them used a hands-free set.

Even some members of the EMF activist community are somewhat incredulous. "The findings are remarkable and without obvious explanation," commented Graham Philips of Powerwatch, a U.K. group. "Direct RF exposure to the fetus from a mobile phone handset is basically non-existent." Philips was one of the first to spot the new paper on the PubMed Web site.

The "lack of biological plausibility" is one of the key issues, Jørn Olsen, a coauthor of the new paper, told Microwave News. Olsen is the chair of the department of epidemiology at the UCLA School of Public Health and is also associated with the University of Aarhus in Denmark. "We do not have a biological mechanism that could explain the findings," he said, "That is, we do not know the 'how' or the 'why'."

The researchers make it clear that the observed findings need to be replicated before they are taken too seriously. "These results were unexpected and should be interpreted with caution. Observed associations are not necessarily causal," they wrote. Yet they close the paper with the following warning, "If they are real, they would have major public health implications." Among the other coauthors are Leeka Kheifets, a professor-in-residence at UCLA, and Hozefa Divan, a doctoral student.

Powerwatch's Alasdair Philips suggested that, if electromagnetic signals from cell phones were indeed behind the observed behavioral problems, he would favor ELF magnetic fields rather than the microwave transmissions. "The batteries powering mobile phones give off 217 Hz pulses and these can induce relatively strong currents in the human body." But, he added, "there are many other non-EMF stressors that are in fact more likely to have been responsible."

Sam Milham, an epidemiologist based in Olympia, WA, thinks it would be a mistake to dismiss the new findings. "It's a solid study," he said. Milham pointed to a paper published last month by Michael Persinger's group at Canada's Laurentian University, which shows that weak magnetic field pulses —as low as 30nT (0.3mG)— can cause structural changes in the brains of prenatally-exposed rats.

When asked whether he thought it is a good idea for a seven-year-old to use a cell phone, UCLA's Olsen replied, "It would be reasonable to be cautious."

   Download a pdf of our March/April 2008 “News & Comment”

April 28… Another Interphone researcher is expressing concern over the tumor risks associated with the long-term use of mobile phones. "I think the evidence that is accumulating is pointing towards an effect of mobile phones on tumors," Professor Bruce Armstrong of the University of Sydney School of Public Health told "TodayTonight," an Australian current affairs show on Channel 7, a national network.

"I would not want to be a heavy user of a mobile phone," Armstrong said. "People might be shocked to hear that the evidence does seem to be coming more strongly in support of harmful effects."

The ten-year Interphone data has clearly changed Armstrong's outlook. A few years ago, he told the Sydney Morning Herald that "there is no consistent evidence that there is an increased risk of cancer," but even then he allowed that "it could be 15 years before we see an effect."

Armstrong, who is leading the Australian component of the Interphone project, is the second principal investigator of the 13 country teams to urge precaution. Last December, Siegal Sadetzki of the Chaim Sheba Medical Center in Israel told Haaretz, a national newspaper, that, "The time is past when it could be said that this technology does not cause damage; apparently it damages health."

Neither the Australian nor the Israeli results on brain tumor or acoustic neuroma risks have yet been made public. Sadetzki has reported a significant increase of parotid gland tumors after ten years of cell phone use. Her paper appeared in the February 15th issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Meanwhile, the final Interphone paper is still not finished. Just a few days ago, Elisabeth Cardis, who leads the overall Interphone study, told Microwave News that she hopes that the combined results from all 13 countries will be submitted for publication "in the not too distant future." Cardis recently left IARC to join the Center for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL) in Barcelona.

The nine-minute piece also features an interview with Chris Zombolas, the technical director of EMC Technologies. In measurements commissioned by the TV show, Zombolas found that a number of cell phones do not meet the 2W/Kg SAR standard when placed in a pocket and used with a hands-free set or a BlueTooth transmitter. The worst of the four phones tested was a Nokia E65. Zombolas measured an SAR of 3.35W/Kg at 1800MHz and an SAR of 5.84W/Kg at 2100 MHz. The Australian SAR standard is 2W/Kg.

[As of May 4, the TodayTonight segment, "Health Fears over Mobile Phones," can no longer be viewed on the program's Web page, only a brief synopsis is now available. Next-Up, the European activist group, has posted the complete video on its Web site, and it may also be viewed on a Yahoo video site.]

April 10… Vini Khurana hit the big time last week. The Australian neurosurgeon parlayed a 69-page literature review on cell phones and brain tumors into a spot on the U.S. NBC Nightly News. Call it the power of the sound bite.

The centerpiece of Khurana's report is his prediction that cell phone radiation would turn out to be a worse public-health disaster than either smoking or asbestos. On March 27th, the Canberra Times, his hometown newspaper, wrote it up under the headline, "Mobiles May Be a Death Sentence." This prompted some chatter among EMF bloggers, but the big break came the following Sunday when the U.K. Independent ran its own story: "Mobile Phones 'More Dangerous than Smoking'.''

Equating cell phones and tobacco is indeed provocative since we all know that smoking is a killer while the jury is still out on the health risks associated with using a hand-held phone. In fact, this was not the first time a major British newspaper had drawn a parallel between the two. Last year the Times asked, "Could [Mobile Phones] Be the Cigarettes of the 21st Century?" The question may have been rhetorical, but the Times left nothing to the imagination. "Absolutely," it added.

The Times story was definitely noticed, but it was the Independent that touched a nerve. Minutes after the Web editors at the Independent posted the story, it became one of the lead stories on the "Drudge Report," a favorite among those in search of the latest hot news and gossip. It didn't take long for Khurana's warning to become the #1 most popular story (most read and most e-mailed) on the Independent's Web site. It was still on the list, albeit at #10, a week later. In the meantime, hundreds, if not thousands, of other publications and Web sites repeated the claim that using a cell phone might be worse than smoking.

Few American newspapers went along, but on April 3, Bob Bazell, NBC's chief science correspondent, aired an interview with Michael Thun of the American Cancer Society on the Nightly News. The ACS has long maintained that the link between cell phones and cancer is nothing more than a "myth" (see MWN, M/J03 and August 3, 2007), yet this time Thun allowed that there is some "legitimate uncertainty" over what might happen following long-term, cell-phone use. (At this writing, the segment is still on the NBC News Web site, look under "Health.")

Bazell was skeptical at best. Citing unnamed U.S. "experts," he dismissed Khurana's conclusions as "absurd" and concluded that there is "no evidence of danger." Nevertheless he closed his piece with a precautionary hedge against the unknown. "It's never a bad idea to use your earpiece to get the antenna away from your head," he advised.

Why did Khurana's report get so much more media play than, for example, the BioInitiative Report, which offers a much more detailed analysis of EMF health risks by some of the leading researchers in the field? Part of the reason is that Khurana is a brain surgeon and it is only natural for people to think that he would know about brain tumor risks. (Hey, it is brain surgery!) That his report offers little that is new may have been missed by those who never ventured beyond the "Key Messages" in its first few pages.

Another way to think about it is that the episode offers another lesson on the vagaries of what becomes news. Few can predict what stories will catch the public's imagination, though a provocative sound bite always helps. Yet, a receptive audience is an important part of the equation. One sure lesson of the Khurana episode is that the public, even though enamored by cell phones, has a latent concern about the long-term risks.

March 14… The Interphone saga gets weirder and weirder. The latest chapter comes with the release, earlier this week, of a status report on EMFs and health by the Swedish Radiation Protection Authority (SSI).

Recent Research on EMF Health Risks, the fifth annual report by an independent expert group, covers what was learned about various types of EMFs, from ELF to RF, in 2007. Here we address only what it says about the latest Interphone results —or more precisely, what it does not say.

For reasons that we cannot begin to understand, the group headed by Anders Ahlbom of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm never mentions what is arguably the most important cell phone study published last year: the Lahkola study, an analysis of the Interphone data from five northern European countries. It points to a long-term risk of a brain tumor on the side of the head the phone was used. (See our post of January 22, 2007).

It is impossible that the SSI panel did not know of this meta-analysis. The second author of Lahkola, Anssi Auvinen of Finland's University of Tampere, is a member of the panel, and the Karolinska's Maria Feychting, another Lahkola coauthor, is its scientific secretary. Indeed, Ahlbom is himself associated with the Interphone project and could hardly be unaware of Lahkola.

The Lahkola study was posted online on January 17, 2007 —at the very beginning of the year. For a moment, we thought it might have been included in last year's SSI report. Not so.

Nor was the Lahkola paper the only Interphone study to be ignored by the SSI committee. The French and Israeli papers were also somehow left out. Both indicate a possible long-term tumor risk. (We do allow that the Israeli study was published in December when this report was being finished, though we suspect that Auvinen and Feychting as members of the Interphone project would likely have been aware of those results and the fact that they would soon be published.)

The panel did cite two new Interphone studies —a German one on acoustic neuroma and Norwegian one on brain tumors. Neither showed an elevated risk.

Why were the three Interphone papers suggesting cell-phone tumor risks shunted aside while those showing no risks included? Is this about the power of money to keep the lid on the cell phone health debate? Is this about political interference?

Whoever or whatever is responsible, it goes much deeper than Sweden's SSI. Of the seven members of the panel, five have strong ties to ICNIRP: Three are members of the commission (Ahlbom, U.K.'s Richard Saunders and France's Bernard Veyret), and two others are members of its standing committees (Finland's Jukka Juutilianen and U.S.' Leeka Kheifets). The report is a reflection of the leadership of the EMF community and it indicates a need for change.

But first, we need an answer to the question: How could these studies have possibly been ignored?

   Download a pdf of our January/February 2008 “News & Comment”

February 15… If anyone is still not convinced that the completed Interphone study should be released as soon as possible (see January 30), they need look no further than how the Interphone results from Japan were handled last week.

A team led by Naohito Yamaguchi, Toru Takebayashi and Masao Taki reported that there was no increased risk of brain tumors among regular users of mobile phones in Japan. Well, actually, that's not quite true. They found that the odds of developing one type of brain tumor (a glioma) was close to six times higher among especially heavy users, but they decided that this result was unreliable. Their paper will be published by the British Journal of Cancer and was posted on its Web site on February 5.

At the same time, Cancer Research UK, a charitable organization and the publisher of the British Journal of Cancer, issued a press release to help the media put the new findings into some kind of context. "So far, studies have shown no evidence that mobile use is harmful, but we can't be completely sure about their long-term effects," explained Lesley Walker, its director of cancer information.

Perhaps, director of cancer misinformation would be more appropriate. We will not go over —yet again— all the studies that point to a long-term tumor risk. We most recently spelled them out on January 30. But we will repeat that when the Interphone data from five Northern European countries were analyzed together, they did point to a higher risk of two different types of tumors and that the U.K. was one of those five countries.

It's true that Walker left open the possibility of long-term effects, but this is just her "get out of jail free" card. She's ignoring the findings already published in peer-reviewed journals on what happens to people who use a cell phone for long periods of time, especially ten years or more. No one is saying there's conclusive proof that cell phones lead to cancer, but to say that there is "no evidence" is nonsense.

Walker and others at Cancer Research must know better. Why is the cancer establishment —and Cancer Research UK lies at its summit — so intent on burying the possibility of a cell-phone cancer risk? Why is it behaving just like an industry lobby group?

We should note that despite all the reassuring headlines prompted by the new Japanese paper (and its accompanying press release), it adds practically nothing to our understanding of the long-term risks. For gliomas, the type of brain tumor found elevated in past studies, there were only seven cases who had used a cell phone for more that six-and-a-half years and only two cases for ten years or longer. Even the Japanese acknowledge that the ten-year numbers are "very small." The total study population included 83 cases with a glioma.

We hear that some progress is being made towards breaking the deadlock and completing the final Interphone paper. Elisabeth Cardis, the Interphone study director, leaves IARC in just over a month. That's not much time to maneuver if the paper is to be submitted before she decamps for Barcelona.

February 12... Dariusz Leszczynski has been applying the powerful new techniques of molecular biology (specifically, proteomics) to better understand EMF effects. A couple of years ago he predicted that they would "help in the discovery of the biophysical and biochemical mechanisms."

Now, Leszczynski and collaborators at Finland's Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) in Helsinki have shown that relatively low-power mobile phone radiation can alter the production of proteins in human skin. Ten women volunteered to have their forearms irradiated with 900 MHz GSM radiation for one hour at an SAR of 1.3 W/Kg —well below the European cell phone exposure standard of 2.0 W/Kg. A small sample of skin was then removed and analyzed. The levels of eight different proteins (out of a total of 580) were found to be significantly changed.

Perhaps most tantalizing is that two of these proteins were changed in all ten subjects. This might one day lead to a marker for an EMF-specific response.

The function and significance of these altered protein levels are at this point unknown. But, as Leszczynski pointed out in a press release, issued by STUK earlier today, this is the first time anyone has examined whether RF radiation can cause changes in protein expression in living people. "Mobile phone radiation has some biological effect," he said. "Even if the changes are small, they still exist."

"All this means that the human body recognizes this low-level radiation and reacts to it," Leszczynski told Microwave News. These effects are similar to those Leszczynski has previously observed in human cells grown in the lab. The next step, he said, is to extend this pilot study to 50 or as many as 100 volunteers. But first, he has to find the necessary funding.

These new findings appear in BMC Genomics, an open access journal, which allows free downloads of both the abstract and the complete paper.

SET INTERPHONE FREE

January 30... 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.

The real reason, we believe, is that the study shows that there are tumor risks following long-term use of a mobile phone and that some of the Interphone researchers don't want to go public.

Why? As Elisabeth Cardis, the Interphone study director, explained last October, the interpretation of the data is "not straightforward" (see our October 9 post). This allows one faction to hold up the process by arguing that there is no point scaring the public if the elevated risk estimates may be spurious.

At the same time, the worldwide wireless industry —now worth on the order of a trillion dollars— and the governments that tax them are applying pressure, subtle or otherwise, to keep the lid on.

The willingness of some Interphone players to downplay the risks has been apparent for a long time. Here's how U.K.'s Tony Swerdlow, advised the press on an Interphone acoustic neuroma study back in 2005: "The results of our study suggest that there is no substantial risk of in the first decade after starting use. Whether there are longer-term risks remains unknown…" This was, to put it kindly, outright misdirection. The published paper indicated a statistically significant increased risk after ten years on the side of the head the phone was used. That finding was even in the study's abstract. The next day's headlines were predictable. "Mobile Phone Cancer Link Rejected," the BBC announced.

This 2005 study was based on the pooled data from five Interphone countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the U.K. Last year, researchers from those same five countries reported a parallel elevated, ipsilateral risk for brain tumors after ten years.

Add to those five, the German and the French Interphone groups. Both have also reported increased risks of brain tumors after long-term use (see our January 29, 2006 post and September 19, 2007 post, respectively). A few weeks ago, the French Ministry of Health called for precaution with respect to the use of mobile phones by children.

In December, the Interphone team from Israel brought a third type of tumor —of the parotid gland— into play. (The gland lies just under the skin in the area of the cheek near the ear.) One striking finding was the "exceptionally heavy" use of mobile phones among Israelis. Not only was there an elevated tumor risk, but it showed up earlier, often in less than ten years.

In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Siegal Sadetzki, the leader of the Israeli Interphone group, also called for a precautionary approach to cell phones. "The time is past when it could be said that this technology does not cause damage; apparently it damages health," she said.

We asked Sadetzki what she could tell us about the risks of brain tumors and acoustic neuromas among Israelis. She declined to comment saying only that these results had not yet been submitted for publication. They may well be a key indicator of the long-term risks and need to be made public.

The absence of the Interphone paper has made it easy to avoid dealing with all the signals that point to a cancer risk. A good example is the list of research priorities from the National Academy of Sciences, released on January 17. It skirted the critical data from seven different Interphone countries because, we were told, the Interphone final report was not yet in hand (see below).

Just how absurd the situation has become was apparent at a workshop on Dosimetry Meets Epidemiology hosted by the Swiss National Research Program on Non-Ionizing Radiation (NFP57) in Zurich on January 11. Many of those attending were working on, or had some connection to, the Interphone study, including four of the principal investigators (Anssi Auvinen, Elisabeth Cardis, Maria Feychting and Joachim Schüz). Yet, Interphone was never discussed. Everyone ignored the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

It's easy to see why some people are getting more and more nervous about long-term cell phone use. If Interphone does in fact point to a tumor risk as many observers now believe, the public should be informed. Parents should warn their children. Two billion cell phone users deserve to know what only a select few know now. The next step would be to fund more research.

The code of silence about Interphone must end. Public health demands it.

Elisabeth Cardis is leaving IARC on March 21st to join the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL) in Barcelona. The Interphone paper should be submitted for publication before she leaves Lyon —in a journal which can expedite the review process. The sooner the results are posted on the Internet and available to all, the better.

   Download a pdf of this “News & Comment”

January 25... "Are there any biological effects that are not caused by an increase in tissue temperature (nonthermal effects)?" That was one of the "overarching issues" considered by the NAS-NRC committee at the workshop it hosted last August (see p.11 of the its final report, as well as January 17 below and our August 10 post). At the time, France's Bernard Veyret, the member of the committee who led the discussion, expressed skepticism that such effects had been reliably documented.

Now comes the February 2008 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering with a short paper describing such a nonthermal effect on human white blood cells. The applied 900 MHz RF signal is quite weak —only 0.4V/m. The research team, from the University of Colorado, Boulder, states, "The calculated temperature change resulting from the RF exposure was less than one microdegree" (one-millionth of a degree).

The corresponding author of the new paper is Frank Barnes, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the chair of the NAS-NRC committee that wrote the report released last week.

January 23... Nancy Wertheimer, who more than any other epidemiologist was responsible for identifying the association between magnetic fields and childhood leukemia, died at the age of 80 on Christmas day. The cause was complications following hip replacement surgery, according to Ed Leeper, her life partner and long-time collaborator.

In 1979, Wertheimer and Leeper reported that children living near high-current electrical wiring had a higher than expected rate of leukemia. At the time, the association was seen as a curiosity and was largely discounted and ignored. That all changed in 1988, when a study sponsored by the New York State Department of Health supported their hypothesis. Later work confirmed the link and extended it to measured power-frequency magnetic fields.

"Nancy was a real pioneer," said David Carpenter, the director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University of Albany, NY. In the 1980's, Carpenter ran the health department's New York Power Line Project. Wertheimer and Leeper's final vindication came in 2001 when the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified power-frequency magnetic fields as a possible human carcinogen on the basis of a large body of epidemiological evidence, all stemming from Wertheimer and Leeper's 1979 landmark paper. "It is rare that a scientist opens a whole field of research, which is what Nancy Wertheimer did," Carpenter told Microwave News.

In her later years Wertheimer moved on to other projects. "She felt it was time for younger people to work out what it all really means, including understanding the biophysical mechanism," Leeper said. "Nancy always said that the risks we had found are small but that we may not have identified the real risks, which could, under certain circumstances, be larger, or that we may not be looking at the right end points." That is, we still don't understand what types of fields are responsible and what are they doing.

"Nancy was fascinated by how the body reacts to magnetic fields," Leeper said. "She was a scientist not a public health advocate. People tried to portray her as a dedicated reformer, but that was not her style." Once we uncover the biophysical mechanism —the part of the EMF puzzle that remains unresolved— Wertheimer believed that new applications could be devised, Leeper said, and that medical benefits might follow.

January 17... The NAS-NRC report, released today (see January 15 below), presents a laundry list of research needs to better understand the possible health effects of RF radiation. What's missing is any sense of priorities. The NAS-NRC committee that prepared the report fails to indicate whether characterizing a child's exposure from a cell phone is more important than doing an epidemiological study of children who use them; or whether mechanistic studies are more important than laboratory toxicology experiments.

"We were told not to put priorities on the research needs," Frank Barnes, the chair of the NAS-NRC panel, told Microwave News in a telephone interview from his office at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "They were quite strict about this." When asked who "they" were, Barnes replied that he is not sure whether the order came from the NAS-NRC or from the FDA, which requested the report. "It does not make much sense to me," Barnes said, "I would have defined our mission differently."

Another notable omission is a discussion of the results from the Interphone project. Barnes explained that this was because the final Interphone paper is not yet available. But that's only part of the story. The report does comment on an Interphone methodological analysis —suggesting that selection bias would lead to underestimating the tumor risks— yet it does not acknowledge that published papers from a number of the participating countries, either alone or in a group, have found that long-term users of cell phones have higher rates of two types of tumors (acoustic neuromas and brain tumors). The Israeli study pointing to an increased risk of a third type of tumor, of the parotid gland, among heavy cell phone users came too late (December 6) to be included, according to Barnes.

The report does allow that, "The pending results of the Interphone study... are likely to have a major influence on the direction and scope of future research concerning the use of cellular phones and cancer." But why did the NAS-NRC panel not address the disquieting findings published to date? They too would have prompted an imperative to do more research, especially if the panel had noted that the Interphone results are largely consistent with the Swedish studies of Lennart Hardell and Kjell Hansson Mild.

Most close observers now believe that the epidemiological data show that a health risk from mobile phones can no longer be dismissed. (That's what a senior and well-connected member of the bioelectromagnetic community told us recently.) No one involved with this new report, not the committee, not the NAS-NRC, not the FDA and certainly not the cell phone industry, which paid for it, had any interest in fostering a sense of urgency to step up the pace of health studies. This is especially true in the U.S., where RF research is moribund.

The NAS-NRC committee may not have wanted to highlight the epi findings but it was not reticent about dismissing the controversial and, for many still unresolved, field of RF genotoxicity. The panel favored Vijayalaxmi's and Joe Roti Roti's view that RF radiation cannot cause DNA breaks, and thereby rejected the work of Henry Lai, among others. "[M]ost investigators in the field agree that no compelling body of evidence exists to support the hypothesis that RF fields are genotoxic," they wrote.

Other studies pointing to effects on DNA —such as those from Austria and China— are not cited. The only panel member with direct experience with the RF–DNA work is France's Bernard Veyret, who has openly feuded with the Austrian group, led by Hugo Rüdiger at the University of Vienna. Score one for Veyret.

Lai, Roti Roti and Vijayalaxmi each gave a talk at a workshop hosted by the NAS-NRC panel last August (see our August 10 post). Barnes told us that the report was "mostly" based on what was presented at the August workshop. Who at the NAS-NRC selected the workshop speakers is not known. Barnes could not shed any light on this but said that, "We tried to have as much diversity of opinion as we could."

Nor is it clear who picked the reviewers of the committee's report. What does come across is that the NAS-NRC was unmoved by those who urged it to limit industry influence. At the time the committee's membership was made public, some asked that Leeka Kheifets, a long-time associate of EPRI, the research arm of the electric utility industry, be removed from the panel. The NAS-NRC not only rejected this appeal but later sought advice from another EPRI staffer, Gabor Mezei. The other surprising choice for a reviewer is Teri Vierima of Resources Strategies Inc., a consulting firm that lists EPRI and a host of wireless companies as clients.

Rick Jostes, the NAS-NRC study director, no doubt played a key role in selecting both the workshop speakers and reviewers of the panel's report. Jostes, widely viewed as a skeptic of low-level RF biological effects, retired on December 31.

January 15... On Thursday, January 17, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council (NAS-NRC) will release its report on what types of research, if any, are needed to address potential health effects of radiation used for wireless communications. The report, which was requested by the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), marks the closing chapter of the cooperative research agreement (or CRADA) between the CTIA, the trade association of the cell phone and wireless industries, and the CDRH. The CTIA sponsored the project. Frank Barnes of the University of Colorado, Boulder, chaired the NAS-NRC committee that wrote the report. Back in June, the Center for Science in the Public Interest criticized the makeup of the panel for being too heavily weighted with physicists and engineers at the expense of biologists and for having ties to industry. The NAS-NRC hosted a workshop last summer to review gaps in knowledge of RF biological effects (see our August 10 comment.)

January 9... It's a new year and maybe, just maybe, it signals a new outlook at Radiation Research, a journal with a reputation for publishing negative findings (see, for instance, "Radiation Research and The Cult of Negative Results.")

The journal's January issue features two reports that point to non-thermal effects of RF radiation. The first paper, from Israel's Tel Aviv University, shows that 800 MHz radiation at SARs of 2.9 W/Kg and 4.1 W/Kg can cause chromosomal aberrations in human blood lymphocytes following a 72-hour exposure. The second paper, from a group in Limoges, France, implicates 900 MHz RF radiation in apoptosis (cell death).

The Tel-Aviv group includes Rafi Korenstein, who has long been working on genotoxic effects of electromagnetic radiation. The Israelis advise that their new results "should be taken into consideration when assessing the health risk after continuous exposure to RF radiation at an SAR close to the current threshold set by ICNIRP."

December 12... PERFORM A is a washout. The eight-year, $10 million industry research project that was supposed to answer the question, "Does cellphone radiation cause cancer in animals?" instead promises to sow more confusion and mistrust.

The project consists of six long-term experiments, carried out on mice and rats in four European laboratories. Most everyone connected to PERFORM A—from the researchers who did the work to the cell phone industry that sponsored it—says that it sounds an all-clear: Cell phones are cancer-safe.

In fact, the studies tell us practically nothing. They are impossible to interpret because of a flaw common to all six experiments. The animals were restrained in a fixed position during the radiation exposures and that restraint had a profound impact. There is now no way to disentangle the effect of the exposure system from that of the radiation.

That an exposure system can confound an experiment is nothing new. What is surprising is that the managers of the PERFORM A project disregarded numerous warning signs. Their own preliminary studies pointed to the fact that animals suffered from restraint stress, as could have been predicted from reading the easily accessible scientific literature. And when confronted with the final results of their six experiments, which showed that something had gone terribly wrong, the project team simply looked the other way.

What follows is a story that illustrates what happens when engineering takes precedence over biology and when inconvenient scientific findings are ignored. But most of all, it shows the perils posed by industry-sponsored research where those in charge are pushing for the desired results.

Read the complete story, "Wheel on Trial".

Details on the 19 animal studies on cell phone radiation, 1997-2007, are available here.