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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

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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."









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