A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

Danish cohort study: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )

September 11, 2024

An international team of researchers, many with close ties to ICNIRP, is trying to put to rest the very possibility that RF radiation can lead to brain cancer —and, by extension, any type of cancer.

On August 30, they published a detailed systematic review of RF and cell phone epidemiological studies, which concludes that there is little evidence to justify continued concern over a possible cancer link.

“We can now be more confident that exposure to radio waves from mobile phones or wireless technologies is not associated with an increased risk of brain cancer,” declares Ken Karipidis in the press release. He is an assistant director of the ARPANSA, Australia’s radiation protection agency, and the vice chair of ICNIRP.

March 21, 2024

UPDATE 3
A new group of IARC advisors is meeting in Lyon this week to set priority agents for the agency to review in 2025-2029. More here.

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.

June 11, 2021

A new analysis from the radiation group at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) calls into question the agency’s own classification of wireless radiation as a possible human carcinogen.

On May 27, IARC’s Isabelle Deltour presented the new analysis of the incidence of malignant brain tumors (glioma) in the Nordic countries —Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden— over the last several decades. She spoke at an online colloquium hosted by the German Federal Office of Radiation Protection, known as the BfS.

Deltour argued that the trends are mostly not “compatible” with those seen in the epidemiological studies —principally, Interphone and Lennart Hardell’s— that were the basis of IARC’s 2011 designation of RF radiation as a possible, or 2B, human carcinogen.

May 1, 2017

“Occupational Exposure to ELF Magnetic Fields and Risk for Central Nervous System Disease: An Update of the Danish Cohort Study Among Utility Workers,” International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health, online April 20, 2017.

“We observed elevated risks of dementia, motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis and epilepsy and lower risks of Parkinson disease in relation to exposure to ELF-MF in a large cohort of utility employees.”

December 5, 2016

Geoffrey Kabat offers a remarkably apt critique of his own writings with his answer to the question, “Do Cell Phones Cause Brain Cancer?”:

“The problem with research in this area is not that it is worthless but that all too frequently it is interpreted naively and uncritically and used for partisan rather than scientific purposes.”

That’s from his new book, Getting Risk Right. It may be the only thing he gets right in the whole book. Hard to say because after reading the chapter on cell phone radiation, we couldn’t slog on much further.

June 30, 2014

INTEROCC and INTERPHONE have a lot in common —more than their first five letters. So much in common that it’s a bit freaky. Or, maybe it just shows, once again, how small, insulated and polarized the EMF community is.

The most obvious parallels are that Elisabeth Cardis is the principal investigator of both the...

November 8, 2012

The Danish Cancer Society is reporting that the number of men diagnosed with glioblastoma —the most malignant type of brain cancer— has nearly doubled over the last ten years. Hans Skovgaard Poulsen, the head of neuro-oncology at Copenhagen University Hospital, is calling it a "frightening development...

November 9, 2011

The European Commission is holding a conference on EMFs and Health in Brussels next week. Teslabel, a local activist group, is planning a demonstration outside the meeting, in part because only one side of the research community was invited to speak. Check out the ...

November 3, 2011

The latest update of the Danish cell phone-cancer study is being touted as the biggest and best ever. It shows “no link between mobile phone use and [brain] tumors,” according to the press release.

Don’t believe a word of it.

On October 20, the British Medical Journal released the third installment of the Danish Cancer Society’s cohort study, which has been tracking some 400,000 mobile phones subscribers since the 1980s. The whole enterprise has been dogged by controversy and political suspicions since the first results were published ten years ago.

October 28, 2011

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) is playing some strange games, which will inevitably lead to more public confusion about cell phone cancer risks.

A few days ago, IARC issued some “Questions & Answers” on mobile phones and cancer prompted by last week's release of a new update of the Danish cohort study in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). (We’ll have much more to say about the Danish study in a later post.)

August 11, 2011

UNC's David Richardson was a member of the IARC Working Group in May. He and Australia's ...

June 30, 2011

Danish cancer statistics do not show an elevated risk of acoustic neuroma among those who have used mobile phones for 11 years or more. That's the conclusion of a paper just posted by the American Journal of Epidemiology. Interphone acoustic neuroma results, which, sources say, does point to an increase.

The ...

August 3, 2007

The American Cancer Society is misleading the public —while alleging that Americans are perilously ill-informed about cancer risks. Thanks to the ACS, the front page of this week's Washington Post Health section tells the 30% of the population who believe that "cell phones cause cancer" that they are "wrong."

December 6, 2006

IEI's John Boice, a member of the Danish-American research team that released the new cell phone epi study yesterday, told the Associated Press: "There's really no biological basis for you to be concerned about radio waves. Nonetheless, people are." We wonder why Boice discounts the many reports of RF-induced genetic damage. Surely they qualify as a justifiable reason to be concerned about long-term exposure to cell phone radiation.

December 5, 2006

The use of mobile phones is not linked to cancer, according to a new joint Danish-American study. "We found no increased risk of brain tumors, acoustic neuromas, salivary gland tumors, eye tumors, leukemias or overall cancer," report researchers from the Danish Cancer Society in Copenhagen and the International Epidemiology Institute (IEI) in Rockville, MD. This was the case for both short-term and long-term users. Their results appear in tomorrow's edition of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI).

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