A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

News Center: Main Articles Archive

Promised Studies on Mechanisms Never Done

February 2, 2024

The U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) has closed down its RF radiation research program. Indeed, it appears that work effectively stopped some time ago.

In September 2019, the NTP announced a new project designed to explain how RF radiation causes cancer. It was a year after the NTP made international headlines with its $30 million study showing “clear evidence” that RF caused malignant tumors in rats.

Now, close to four-and-a-half years later, it turns out that none of those experiments to explore mechanisms of cancer causation were ever carried out.

Director Sends Mixed Signals

January 19, 2024

UPDATE 2
IARC has announced that the agency will evaluate the cancer risks of “automotive gasoline and some oxygenated additives” from February 25 to March 4, 2025. The reassesssment of RF radiation will have to wait.

October 25, 2023
UPDATE 1
Other Monograph meetings have now been scheduled for March, June and November 2024. The next possible slot for RF radiation is in early 2025.

December 12, 2022

On November 23, 2002, Elisabete Weiderpass, the Director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), revealed that a new assessment of the evidence linking radiofrequency (RF) radiation to cancer would likely take place in early 2024. A formal decision could come within a few months.

Calls for a new IARC evaluation have been mounting for some years following the release of two large animal studies showing elevated tumor counts after lifelong exposure to RF radiation. Many believe that the animal experiments leave the Agency little choice but to increase the cancer risk classification at least one notch to “probable” from the current “possible,” or perhaps to its highest classification, a known human carcinogen.

But, as Weiderpass made clear on making the announcement at a conference in Paris, the RF–cancer risk might instead be downgraded and the “possible” classification removed.

The stakes are high.

Seven New Commissioners
Akimasa Hirata To Be New Leader

December 11, 2023

In November, the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) elected a new chair, vice chair and seven new Commissioners to join the remaining five. The new lineup takes over in mid-July 2024.

Yet, despite all the changes, ICNIRP’s outlook and policies are expected to remain much the same. While two medical doctors will be joining the Commission —there are none now— the membership will continue to be dominated by physicists and electrical engineers. ICNIRP’s entrenched thermal dogma will most likely continue to hold sway with cancer risks, and other non-thermal effects downplayed, when not dismissed outright.

Setting the Record Straight
A Personal Tribute

October 8, 2023
Last updated October 9, 2023

In the summer of 2012, Paul Brodeur sent me an email that began, “Don’t forget that when I croak, you’re supposed to give some credit to me as the original microwave pioneer.” I came across it in my files after learning that Brodeur had died on August 2nd at the age of 92. It was among his many letters, notes and clippings I had stashed away over the last 50 years.

The story begins on a rainy fall afternoon in 1977 at the New York office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a public-interest environmental law firm, where I was working at the time. Brodeur, then a star investigative reporter at The New Yorker, came by with copies of his new book, The Zapping of America, an exposé on the dangers of microwave radiation and how they were being covered up. The previous December, the magazine had run two long articles by Brodeur which caused a national sensation and drew attention to the otherwise obscure world of electromagnetic health.

Author of “The Zapping of America” and “Currents of Death” Among Many Other Books

August 10, 2023
Last updated August 20, 2023

Paul Brodeur, a seminal voice in publicizing asbestos and electromagnetic radiation health risks, died August 2 on Cape Cod, MA, at the age of 92. For close to 40 years, Brodeur was a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, where many of his exposés first appeared before he expanded them into books.

In December 1976, the New Yorker ran Brodeur’s two-part article on microwave radiation. It would become a sensation in the otherwise insular world of electromagnetic health that up to then had been dominated by military and industrial interests. The following year, Brodeur published The Zapping of America.

The Lai-Singh DNA Breaks 30 Years On
A Conversation with Henry Lai

June 12, 2023
Last updated November 17, 2023

Unremarkable science can sometimes tell a remarkable story. Two papers that were published in the last few weeks —and passed mostly unnoticed— have important, though very different, backstories.

One offers a surprising glimpse of change in the usually static field of RF research, while the other shows how much has stayed the same over the last many years.

Yet, in the end, they offer the same well-worn message, always worth repeating: Those who sign the checks, run the show.

The two papers come 30 years after Henry Lai and N.P. Singh began an experiment at the University of Washington in Seattle that would set off alarm bells across the still-young cell phone industry —and the U.S. military. Lai and Singh would show that a single, two-hour exposure to low-level microwave radiation (today, we’d say RF) could lead to breaks in the helical strands of DNA in the brains of live rats.

Twenty-Two Years and Counting

May 4, 2023
Last updated August 31, 2023

In a big win for the telecoms, and Motorola in particular, a judge has disallowed testimony from the entire slate of expert witnesses who were scheduled to support claims that cell phones can lead to brain tumors.

Judge Alfred Irving Jr. of the Washington DC Superior Court issued the ruling on April 25 in a set of 13 cases collectively known as Murray v Motorola.

The Murray litigation has been going on for a long, long time —think Jarndyce. The original claim was filed more than 20 years ago.

Why Don’t the Tenets of Toxicology Apply?

February 28, 2023

The precautionary principle should be applied to public exposures to RF radiation. So say four senior academic scientists —including the former director of the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP)— in a strongly worded appeal, published today.

Writing in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research, Paul Ben Ishai, Linda Birnbaum, Devra Davis and Hugh Taylor point to a “plethora of both experimental and epidemiological evidence establishing a causal relationship between EMF and cancer and other adverse health effects.”

Dissident Scientists Seek Tighter Health Limits Will They Succeed Where Others Failed?

November 1, 2022
Last updated April 4, 2023

An international group of research scientists has come together to challenge ICNIRP, the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection.

The new panel wants a complete revision of ICNIRP’s guidelines for exposures to radiofrequency (RF) radiation. The researchers are demanding the adoption of more scientifically rigorous standards, which better protect public health and the environment.

“We are calling for an independent evaluation of the limits,” said Joel Moskowitz of Berkeley Public Health.

Corruption of the Scientific Literature Continues

July 20, 2022
Last updated July 22, 2022

My wife and I spent a few days in Basel, Switzerland, earlier this month. One afternoon as we were walking through town, I spotted a carefully crafted warning on the side of an otherwise unremarkable building. “The Odious Smell of Truth,” it called out.

With a little Googling, I learned that the expression comes from the title of an exhibition held at the Royal College of Art in London in the spring of 2017. The show was organized by Peter Kennard, a noted British political artist, and his students. They called themselves the Rage Collective. What does it mean, they wanted to know, to tell the truth in a world of false news and social media misinformation.

As it happens, a few days later, I received an email from Peter Hensinger, the scientific director of Diagnose:Funk, with a commentary he had just published which was sharply critical of Martin Röösli, an associate professor at the University of Basel.

Pages