January 30, 2004... The ability of ELF magnetic fields to damage DNA may be getting clearer (see item below) —but not so for microwaves. Over the last ten years, the battle of the Washington universities has been raging, with Joseph Roti Roti of Washington University in St. Louis at odds with Henry Lai and N.P. Singh of the University of Washington, Seattle. Roti Roti is now claiming the upper hand in the February issue of Radiation Research. (This is his tenth paper on microwaves and DNA to appear in Radiation Research alone.) Isabelle Lagroye of Bernard Veyret’s group at the University of Bordeaux, and Graham Hook, who used to work with George Carlo at Wireless Technology Research, helped Roti Roti run these new experiments. According to Roti Roti, the results imply that “CW 2450 MHz microwaves cannot produce genotoxic effects by directly causing DNA damage.” Still to be answered, however, are the findings of Elisabeth Diem and Hugo Rüdiger of the University of Vienna, members of the European REFLEX project, who reported early last year that microwaves can indeed cause DNA breaks (see MWN, M/A03). The Washington University group does not cite this Austrian work, which has yet to be published....And in his 11th paper in Radiation Research, which is also in the February 2004 issue, Roti Roti says that his group has been unable to repeat Jerry Phillips’s RF-DNA studies (see MWN, J/F98). Motorola, which has long supported Roti Roti’s RF research, paid for these two new studies as well.

 

January 27, 2004... Environmental Health Perspectives will publish a new paper by Henry Lai and N.P. Singh showing that a 24-hour exposure to 100 mG ELF EMFs can lead to significant increases in single- and double-strand DNA breaks. The two University of Washington, Seattle, researchers found even larger increases following a 48-hour exposure, leading them to conclude that the effect is cumulative. They also offer a hypothesis to explain what is going on. The peer-reviewed paper is available now online at no cost. Lai and Singh first reported that 60 Hz EMFs could damage DNA in 1995 (see MWN, N/D95). Since then, a number of other labs in Europe and in India have reported similar findings (see MWN, N/D98 and M/J00). And even more recently, two of the participants of the EC’s REFLEX project have also seen similar genotoxic effects (see MWN, S/O02). See also our comment.

 

January 27, 2004... A court in El Paso, TX, ruled on January 26 that German soldiers who developed cancer after being exposed to X-ray radiation from radar components can pursue their claims against the manufacturers of the equipment, according to the German edition of the Deutsche Welle. The defendants include GE, Raytheon and Lucent. The case, which was filed in a Texas state court in October 2002, also seeks compensation for U.S. soldiers, who might have been similarly exposed (see MWN, N/D02).

 

January 26, 2004... The U.S. military continues to investigate what might happen if you were zapped by one of its microwave weapons. Active denial technology, as the military calls it, uses 94 GHz millimeter waves (MMW) to induce pain by heating the skin. The Marine Corps says it’s like touching “an ordinary light bulb that has been left on for a while” —in fact, it’s just a “harmless energy beam,” according to the marines. Not everyone agrees. When the microwave gun was officially uncloaked in 2001, Ross Adey, a leading researcher who has had a number of clashes with the U.S. Air Force over the years, told UPI that such claims were a “bunch of crap” (see MWN, M/A01). In its latest published study, which appears in the February issue of Health Physics, USAF’s Patrick Mason and coworkers at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio continue to maintain that there is nothing to worry about: “In the few instances in which humans would be exposed to relatively high levels of MMW (i.e., 175 mW/cm, it is clear that the skin blood flow response would provide adequate thermal protection, as it efficiently removed heat from the skin before thermal damage could occur.” Mason is also leading an effort to see whether Leif Salford and Bertil Persson’s experiments on the effects of microwaves on the blood-brain barrier can be replicated.

 

January 26, 2004... Danish researchers have found no support for Lennart Hardell and Kjell Hansson Mild’s contention that mobile phones increase the risk of acoustic neuromas. A team led by Christoffer Johansen of the Danish Cancer Society in Copenhagen compared the histories of 106 cases of acoustic neuromas, benign tumors of the cranial nerve, with those of 212 controls. There was no elevated rate of cancer, even among those who had used a cell phone for ten years or more. Last year, Hardell of Sweden’s Orebro Medical Center reported that users of analog phones had a more than fourfold increased risk of developing acoustic neuromas (see MWN, M/A03). “The main result of this study is in line with the majority of epidemiologic findings reported so far,” Johansen states in the February 1 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. This is the first published finding of the Interphone study, in which researchers from 14 countries are investigating possible cancer risks posed by mobile telephones. The Interphone study is being coordinated by Elisabeth Cardis of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France (see MWN, J/F98, S/O98 and M/A00). The U.S. is not participating in the Interphone study.

 

January 22, 2004... The U.K. Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Program (MTHR) has announced (January 22) that it is initiating two new research projects. Prof. Elaine Fox of the University of Essex will direct a study of EMF hypersensitivity symptoms among a group of volunteers, and Dr. Julie Barnett at the University of Surrey will lead an effort that will explore how people understand uncertain risks associated with mobile phones and towers. Both projects are due to be completed in December 2005.

 

January 20, 2004... On January 15, the Health Council of the Netherlands issued its EMF update, for the period May 2001 through May 2003. The report addresses both ELF and RF EMFs. (The complete text is available in Dutch and English; the English section begins on p.63.) It does not cover the TNO findings, published last September, which point to subjective health complaints following exposures to GSM mobile phone signals as low as 1 V/m (implicating SARs of less than 0.078 mW/Kg). (TNO stands for the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research.)

 

January 20, 2004... A U.K. panel has concluded that health research on RF/MW radiation published over the last three years “does not give cause for concern.” In a report released on January 14, the Advisory Group on Non-Ionizing Radiation (AGNIR) found that, “The weight of evidence now available does not suggest that there are adverse effects from exposures to RF fields below guideline levels.” But the committee also cautioned that the available literature has “limitations” and that “mobile phones have only been in widespread use for a relatively short time.” Research should therefore continue, it advised. The review was requested by the Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones (chaired by Sir William Stewart) in its own report, Mobile Phones and Health, issued three years ago (see MWN, M/J00). The AGNIR was established in 1990 to advise the U.K. National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB). In an accompanying statement, the NRPB said that the AGNIR report “ supports the broad conclusions of the Stewart report in 2000 that a precautionary approach to the development of mobile phone technology remains a justifiable approach.” A press release on the new AGNIR report, as well as a summary and the complete 177-page report, Health Effects from Radiofrequency Electromagnetic Fields, are posted on the Web.

 

January 20, 2004... Researchers at McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA, led by Michael Rohan have found that an MRI can significantly alleviate depression among those with bipolar disorder. A chance finding led to the study in which 30 bipolar patients were given a scan with a GE 1.5 Tesla MRI: 23 (77%) reported an improvement in their mood, while only 4 of 14 (29%) healthy control subjects noted a similar enhancement. All 11 patients who were not taking mood-stabilizing medication said that they felt better after the scan. The results are in the January issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. “The brain is an electrochemical organ, and we’ve always been working with it chemically to treat illnesses,” Dr. Bruce Cohen, the head psychiatrist at McLean, told the Boston Globe (January 1). “Working with it magnetically is very exciting: It may sound like science fiction, but it really makes good sense that you can change its activity and push people out of depression.” McLean is affiliated with Harvard Medical School.

 

January 20, 2004... 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.

 

January 20, 2004... Today it may be more of historical than scientific interest, but EPA’s 1990 evaluation of EMF cancer risks is now available on the Internet at no charge. Back then, the draft Evaluation of the Potential Carcinogenicity of Electromagnetic Fields was a hot item. A team led by Dr. Robert McGaughy had recommended that power-frequency EMFs should be classified as “probable human carcinogens” and that RF/MW radiation be considered a “possible human carcinogen.” These conclusions were leaked to Microwave News and were later broadcast around the world (see MWN, M/J90). The White House moved quickly to quell the controversy and commissioned another report, which, to no one’s surprise, found that there was in fact no EMF cancer risk (see MWN, N/D92). When the EPA draft report was released in late 1990, the EPA stated that it would be “inappropriate” to compare EMFs to chemical carcinogens. McGaughy’s position was later vindicated. In 1998, an expert panel assembled by the NIEHS judged ELF EMFs to be “possible human carcinogens” (see MWN, J/A98), and three years later, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) made the designation official (see MWN, J/A01). Work on the EMF report continued at EPA through the mid-1990s (see MWN, J/F98), but it was never released in final form. McGaughy, who is still at EPA, told us recently that under EPA’s current cancer guidelines, EMFs would be seen as “likely” carcinogens, but noted that any official decision would depend on an agency evaluation which has neither been done nor is planned. “Personally, I think there is something to worry about,” McGaughy said.


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