February 27, 2004... WHO’s Mike Repacholi and his radiation program are under fire over allegedly suppressing a report on the hazards associated with depleted uraninium, according to the Sunday Herald in Scotland.

 

February 25, 2004... Dr. Frank Barnes, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, has been awarded the Bernard Gordon prize by the National Academy of Engineering. The honor comes with a check for $500,000. Barnes, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, was cited for “pioneering an interdisciplinary telecommunications program,” which helps engineering students master economics and policy issues. Barnes is currently the chair of a National Academy of Sciences–National Research Council committee investigating the potential health effects of PAVE PAWS radar radiation. He is a former president of the Bioelectromagnetics Society (2000-2001).

 

February 23, 2004... On February 23, the National Toxicology Program released its request for proposals (No. NIH-ES-04-06) for large-scale animal studies to evaluate the possible toxic and carcinogenic effects of cell phone radiation. The FDA originally asked for these studies more than five years ago (see MWN, N/D99, J/A00, M/J01 and M/J03). The total cost of the project will be on the order of $10 million. Proposals are due by April 8.

 

February 9, 2004... In their new book, Votre GSM, Votre Santé: On Vout Ment! [Your GSM Mobile Phone, Your Health: They Are Lying to You!] four French researchers lay out their assessment of the risks associated with cell phones. Richard Gautier, Pierre Le Ruz, Daniel Oberhausen and Roger Santini call for EMF policies free from the political and economic pressures of the telecom, electronic and electric utility industries and for a national RF exposure standard of 0.6 V/m or 0.1 µW/cm².

 

February 9, 2004... At a conference in the summer of 2002, Maren Fedrowitz of Wolfgang Löscher’s group at the Hannover Medical School in Germany explained why the Battelle labs in the U.S. had been unable to repeat Meike Mevissen and Löscher’s experiments showing that EMFs can promote breast cancer in rats. It was because of genetic variations among substrains of rats, she said. [You can now download our story on the conference from the J/A02 issue of Microwave News at no charge.] In a just-published paper, Löscher and Fedrowitz present lots of details to back up this argument. “The use of [magnetic field]-sensitive and -resistant strains or substrains of rats offers a valuable approach to search for genetic factors or genetic predisposition that may underlie the sensitivity to cocarcinogenic or tumor-promoting effects of [magnetic field] exposure,” they write in the January 1 issue of Cancer Research. See also our commentary.


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