News & CommentKey Documents
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 heavily-exposed 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.
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.
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."
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