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January 21, 2005... One of the lessons to be learned from the aftermath of the second Stewart report, released by the UK NRPB last week (see below), is that interpreting the mobile phone health data is much like reading Rorschach inkblots. What you see depends a lot on your mind-set. Robert Matthews, the Daily Telegraph’s science correspondent, thinks that Sir William made “a bad call.” After noting that there were concerns at the NRPB press conference over last October’s Karolinska study, that showed a doubling of the risk of acoustic neuromas among those who had used a cell phone for more than ten years, Matthews went on to write: “What was not made clear, however, is that the tumor is benign, non-fatal and astonishingly rare: just one person is affected per 100,000 per year.” He then added that Maria Feychting, who led the Karolinska study, is not very worried about all this. He quoted Feychting as saying: “I must say I am happy my children have mobile phones, because then I know where they are... I would not stop them using one.” On the other hand, in today’s Financial Times, Clive Cookson took a different tack: “Although [an acoustic neuroma is] a benign tumor, it leads to deafness and loss of balance —and if it is not removed surgically, it will eventually kill the patient.” He quoted Anders Ahlbom, another member of the Karolinska team, saying “it’s a strong association” but one that must be replicated before it can be relied upon. Contrast also the title of Cookson's article, “The Warnings We Must Listen To,” with Matthews’s, “Dial M for Myth.” [Unfortunately, there is no free on line access to this FT story. The FT will continue with a second article next Monday.] Should we trust Matthews or Cookson? Should we follow the lead of Feychting or that of her mentor, Ahlbom? Cookson concluded with an important point: As the number of subscribers surges past 1.5 billion, even a tiny individual health risk could translate into thousands of deaths.” Let’s do the math. If the Karolinska study is found to reflect a real neuroma risk, then one cell phone user per 100,000 will develop a tumor each year. That comes to 15,000 cases a year based on today’s usage and 20,000 by the end of this year when, as Deloitte predicted earlier this week, there will be 2 billion owners of mobile phones. So, between 2015 and 2020, there could be (very approximately) a total of 100,000 tumor cases, most of which would have been avoidable. Could this be an acceptable risk for the convenience of using a cell phone without a hands-free kit? (We wonder why Feychting doesn’t ask her kids to use hands-free kits.) Do we really want to let the industry off the hook and not bother to do the research to better understand the health impacts of cell phones? Ahlbom told the Financial Times that it is the “the responsibility of the industry to support research.”

Matthews of the UK Telegraph closes with a quote from Adam Burgess of the University of Bath who predicted that the cell phone controversy will eventually go the same way as the now-forgotten scares over color TVs, VDTs and microwave ovens. Burgess, the author of Cellular Phones, Public Fears and a Culture of Precaution, should know better. (Disclosure: If you read the book, you may well conclude that Burgess believes that Microwave News has unnecessarily fanned the flames of the EMF controversy.) Burgess would have us believe that the radiation risks from these appliances are urban legends. The truth is very different, and Burgess should know better. In each case, a technological fix reduced radiation exposures to the point where the risk could be justifiably ignored. For color TVs, lead was added to the glass of the cathode ray tube, thereby absorbing any troublesome X-rays. Whether VDT EMFs could cause adverse pregnancy outcomes was never settled —much like today’s cell phone industry, VDT manufacturers did not want to do any research. But the question became moot when TCO, the Swedish union, single-handedly forced the industry to reduce stray VDT emissions to a very low level. (TCO Development is now encouraging the production of safer phones.) And microwave oven radiation became a non-problem when the US FDA set tough leakage standards and actually enforced these rules. (That was a very different FDA than the one we have today that has been captured by the industry.) Another important point is that in all three cases the radiation emissions were unwanted byproducts. Cell phones are very different, the radiation conveys the message. No radiation, no conversation.

January 15, 2005... Going through our collection of clips on the new Stewart report this afternoon, we came across the following quote by Paolo Vecchia, the chair of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), in a press release issued by the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association (AMTA) on January 11:

“Because EMF exposure guidelines are based on worst-case hypotheses and include reduction factors providing safety margins for possible lack of data, the Commission does not need to create separate guidelines to protect special groups such as children.”

This is a truly astonishing statement. The ICNIRP EMF limits allow children to be exposed to up to 999 mG, anytime and all the time. Vecchia is well aware of the large number of epidemiological studies that point to a cancer risk above 3-4 mG. So he must know that these epi results point to the worst-case hypothesis. We wonder what the other members of ICNIRP —especially Anders Ahlbom who has done more than anyone to show that the EMF-childhood leukemia risk is highly credible— think about what Vecchia said and more importantly why ICNIRP has consistently failed to advocate a precautionary approach to children’s EMF exposures. Why not ask them. All their e-mail addresses are given in the link above.

The AMTA attributed Vecchia’s quote to a talk he gave at a workshop on children’s sensitivity to EMFs, hosted by the WHO International EMF Project in Istanbul last June. We were sufficiently incredulous that we decided to check it out (our travel budge did not allow us to go to Turkey). We found Vecchia’s PowerPoint presentation on the WHO EMF Web site and, yes, the AMTA got it right.

January 14, 2005... As the aftershocks from the Stewart report continue to reverberate, the telecom industry is brazenly moving forward with its plan for a major relaxation of the US limit for radiation exposures from cell phones. Yesterday and today, some members of the IEEE International Committee on Electromagnetic Safety (ICES) are meeting to hammer out their revision of the IEEE RF safety standard (known as C95.1). One of the major planned changes is to replace the current SAR limit of 1.6 W/Kg, averaged over 1g of tissue, with a standard of 2.0 W/Kg, averaged over 10g. James Lin of the University of Illinois, Chicago, who was recently appointed a member of ICNIRP, has called this proposal to increase the averaging volume from 1g to 10g “scientifically indefensible” (see MWN, J/A00 and N/D00). According to Lin, a limit of 2.0 W/Kg averaged over 10g would be approximately equivalent to an S AR of 4-6 W/Kg, averaged over 1g (see MWN, S/O01 and M/J03). Or to put it more simply, ICES wants to triple the amount of radiation you could get from a cell phone. Exactly who was invited to this “editorial” meeting is not clear. (ICES’ procedures are not what you might call transparent. Over the years, we have repeatedly asked to be advised of future meetings. But soon after we make it onto the mailing list, our name is somehow deleted. No one can explain why this keeps happening.) We do know, however, where the ICES meeting is taking place: on the Motorola campus in Plantation, Florida. What remains to be seen is whether the FCC will bow to industry pressure and gut the cell phone standard. Anyone want to bet that the commission will stand its ground?

January 13, 2005... The British press has given a lot of ink to the Stewart report, featuring numerous interviews with Sir William. In one of the most detailed of these he told Nic Fleming of the Daily Telegraph that he is “more concerned” about possible health risks today than he was five years when he first called for children to be discouraged from using mobile phones. Sir William said that, “When it comes to suggesting that mobile phones should be available to three- to eight-year-olds, I can’t believe for a moment that can be justified. It seems to me ludicrous.” He explained: “They should not have them because children’s skulls are not fully thickened, their nervous systems are not fully developed and the radiation penetrates further into their brains.” Not everyone agrees with Stewart. The editorial writers at the Telegraph, for example, called him a “Professional Fusspot.” They wrote that “all human activity carries risks, and we have quite enough to worry about these days, without getting into a flap about dangers that may or may not exist.” Even some of those who report to Sir William at the NRPB appear to a bit uneasy. (We doubt that the NRPB has yet gotten comfortable with having an activist chairman.) In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, published today, Michael Clark of the NRPB’s press office tried to moderate Sir William’s warnings. “Our chairman felt very strongly that parents ought to be aware of the risk of a risk. But we found no hard evidence of a risk,” Clark said. On this side of the Atlantic, the Journal quotes David Heim, the deputy editor of Consumer Reports, who also downplayed possible health concerns, as did officials at the FCC and the FDA (see January 11, below). Heim discounted recent studies that point to hazards —such as the Karolinska paper, published last October, pointing to an increased incidence of acoustic neuromas among those who had used cell phones for more than ten years. He reasons that ten years ago everyone was using analog phones, and since these are no longer around, it would be a mistake to infer that the present generation of digital phones is unsafe. “Analog phones use considerably more power than digital phones and their emission patterns are different,” he told the Journal. Heim is right, but he neglects to mention that pulsed radiation, like the signals from many digital phones, is more biologically active than the continuous wave (CW) radiation from analog phones. At this point, no one knows whether the enhanced biological activity might compensate for the weaker signals. And we will not know for another decade or so, by which time we will probably have graduated to yet another type of phones with yet another set of radiation signals. Health research may never catch up with the changing technology, preserving industry’s and Consumer Reports’ ability to keep on the path of denying the relevance of health studies as they are published. But Heim is ignoring a much more fundamental issue. According to current (official) thinking, analog cell phones should not be able do anyone any damage. If the Karolinska study turns out to reflect a true tumor risk (and it’s the second epidemiological study to point that way) all bets would be off. We may have been wrong about analog phones and equally wrong about digital phones. Why then is Consumers Union and its magazine, Consumer Reports, so gung ho about discounting digital phone risks —to the point of sounding like they are part of industry’s PR machine? It’s true that Consumer Reports has long been uninterested in cell phone health risks, (see MWN, J/F02, p.19), but it’s still strange that its editors’ first instinct is to dismiss an important new study by a leading group of Swedish researchers on little more than wishful thinking. As we argued in our recent commentary on the precautionary principle, the reason the EMF controversy never moves forward toward resolution is that those whom we count on to speak out on behalf of public health remain strangely silent —or worse, shoot from the hip in the wrong direction— when it comes to electromagnetic radiation.

Before moving on, we should give credit to the Journal for covering the Stewart report. It is practically the only newspaper in America to do so. The Financial Times had an item in its UK news, but, perhaps because the FT well understands the US market, it did not bother to run the news in its US edition.

As expected, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences today released its report on the possible health impacts of the US Air Force’s PAVE PAWS radar. The investigating committee found that, “There is no evidence of adverse health effects to Cape Cod residents from long-term exposure to radiofrequency energy from [the] nearby U.S. Air Force radar installation," the press release states. You can download a free summary. You can also read the report page-by-page, but you cannot download a full copy. The published report will be available for purchase later this winter from the National Academy Press.

January 11, 2005... In its report, released today, the board of the NRPB reaffirmed its call for a “precautionary approach” to the use of mobile phones. One of the key recommendations is that “particular attention be given to how best to minimize exposure of potentially vulnerable subgroups such as children.” In the NRPB press release, Sir William Stewart, the chair of the board, states that, “The fact is that the widespread use of mobile phones is a relatively recent phenomenon and it is possible that adverse health effects could emerge after years of prolonged use.” The UK papers led with the risk to children. “Get Off that Mobile, Expert Tells Children,” ran the headline in the Sunday Times, when it broke the story ahead of today’s official release. Yesterday, the Daily Telegraph followed with “Fresh Warning over Children and Mobiles,” and today the BBC announced, “Child Warning over Mobile Phones.” CNN went with the same thread: “Expert: Keep Children from Mobiles.” Here in the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration (FDA),which has long sought to pacify those worried about possible cell phone health effects, tried to spin the story out of existence. Howard Cyr, the agency's point man on the health effects of electromagnetic radiation at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, sent out an e-mail saying that the FDA “agrees with the NRPB on its basic conclusion that there is no hard evidence of adverse health effects on the general public (the NRPB did say that). But the FDA added: “With regards to the safety of children and use of cell phones by children, the scientific evidence does not show a danger to users of wireless communication devices including children” (that’s the FDA’s emphasis). Given all the bad press that the FDA has been attracting recently (think Vioxx), one might think that warnings put forward by its British counterpart might merit a more considered and less deceptive approach. Perhaps Cyr, who is semiretired, is unaware that Sir William Stewart is the former science advisor to Prime Minister John Major. Perhaps Cyr doesn’t care. He simply sees his job as making sure that the cell phone story sinks somewhere offshore in the Atlantic. You can download the full NRPB report at no cost.

January 8, 2005... Next week two major reports will be released to the public. On Tuesday January 11, the National Radiological Protection Board, or NRPB, will issue a review of the current state of knowledge on mobile phones and health. The report is already being called “Stewart#2.” Sir William Stewart was the chair of the Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones (IEGMP) that issued Mobile Phones and Health. in May 2000 (see MWN, M/J00). Sir William is now the chair of the NRPB. This second report was one of the recommendations of the 2000 report (see MWN, M/J00), though the panel asked for it to be ready in 2003. The most widely cited conclusion of the Stewart#1 report is that children be discouraged from using mobile phones. Even though this remains official policy, the UK government has made no serious effort to implement this recommendation and most kids don’t have a clue that mobiles may present a radiation risk. Then on January 13, the U.S. National Research Council (NRC), a branch of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), will release its assessment of the potential health effects from exposure to the RF radiation from the U.S. Air Force’s PAVE PAWS radar located on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The PAVE PAWS project was requested by Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) in 2001, and was initially slated to be completed in two years (see MWN, N/D01, J/F02 and M/A02). The chair of the NAS-NC panel is Frank Barnes of the University of Colorado, Boulder. The report will be released in Sandwich, MA, at a one-hour public briefing.

January 7, 2005... The 4^th International Seminar on EMFs and Biological Effects will be held in Kunming, China, September 12-16. The official language of the meeting is English. The third seminar was held in Guilin in October 2003.

January 7, 2005... Everyone else is doing it so we thought we would try too. Welcome to the Microwave News Blog. In the weeks and months ahead, we will try to give our readers some perspective on the news. As you can see below, we have posted some comments in the past, admittedly on a sporadic basis. We will now try to follow a more regular schedule. As always, comments are welcome. Write to us at:
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