A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

Germany: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )

September 11, 2025

Drivers and passengers of electric vehicles are routinely bathed in surprisingly strong electromagnetic pulses, according to the most comprehensive measurement survey ever carried out. These transients, as they are called, are fast bursts of energy which have been implicated in numerous health controversies over the last 40 years, always without resolution.

The new survey, which included close to a million individual measurements in 13 different electric and hybrid car models, showed that peak fields often exceeded the current European reference limits. In special cases, for instance when starting the engine, the fields could be far higher —up to 12 times those limits (measured in a hybrid).

Gernot Schmid, the study team leader at the Seibersdorf Labs in Austria, described the peak fields as “astonishingly high.” Manufacturers could reduce them, he said, if magnetic fields were “taken into account at an early stage of vehicle design.”

August 18, 2025

“A Systematic Review of the Impact of EM Waves on Living Beings,” Cureus, August 17, 2025. “These findings underscore the significant health and environmental risks associated with rising exposure levels of EMF, highlighting the urgent need for strategies to mitigate the risks.”

July 17, 2025

“RF EMFs Reduce Bumble Bee Visitation to Flowers,” Environmental Pollution, July 14, 2025. No effect of 2.4 & 5.8 GHz RF on flower visitation rates by honey bees. But there was a “significant reduction” in visits by bumble bees when the plants were exposed to the RF. From Germany.

July 14, 2025

“Weak RF Field Effects on Biological Systems Mediated through the Radical Pair Mechanism,” Chemical Reviews, July 14, 2025. A major review of the radical pair mechanism as a possible explanation —or not— of low-level RF biological effects from Germany’s University of Oldenburg with participation and funding from the BfS, the German radiation protection office.

February 9, 2025

One of the longest-running newsletters on the health and environmental impact of electromagnetic fields and radiation —the ElektrosmogReport— is now available in English.

Diagnose:Funk, the publisher, is translating the German-language original and making it available at no charge. Both versions come out quarterly. D:F is a consumer and environmental protection group with offices in Germany and Switzerland.

January 10, 2022

Leif Salford celebrated his 80th birthday on December 7. An emeritus professor at Sweden’s Lund University and a noted neurosurgeon, Salford spent much of his career treating patients with brain tumors. Over the years, he became frustrated as, all too often, he was unable to save them with a scalpel.

In 1987, Salford came across a paper in Neuroscience Letters from a group at the University of Western Ontario, who had found that rats undergoing the equivalent of a routine MRI scan showed changes in their blood-brain barrier. The BBB is a membrane that keeps potentially toxic substances in the bloodstream from getting into the brain. It’s not a perfect barrier —it can leak. The Canadians reported that something about the electromagnetic exposures during the MRI scan had increased the permeability of the rats’ BBB. It had become more porous.

If microwaves used in the MRI were responsible, Salford thought....

February 8, 2021

A German court of appeals has ordered Alexander Lerchl to stop smearing the authors of two papers which show that mobile phone radiation can break DNA and possibly cause cancer. For more than a decade, Lerchl, a professor of biology at Jacobs University in Bremen, has charged, without evidence, that the experimental data from Hugo Rüdiger’s lab at the Medical University of Vienna (MUV) were fabricated.

In its long-awaited decision, dated December 11, 2020, and released at the end of January, the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court of Bremen threatened Lerchl with a fine of up to €250,000 (~US$300,000), or six months in prison, if he continues to falsely disparage the Rüdiger papers. The penalties would apply each time Lerchl violates the court order. Lerchl must also pay €20,000 in court costs.

June 25, 2020

The German government is the main sponsor of ICNIRP, the International Commission for Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection.

The Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU), which is the bureaucratic parent of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS), has contributed 70-80% of ICNIRP’s annual income in each of the last three years. This...

February 16, 2017

“RF Radiation Injures Trees Around Mobile Phone Base Stations,” Science for the Total Environment, December 1, 2016.

“We found a high-level damage in trees within the vicinity of phone masts.” From a German-Spanish team.

December 1, 2014

”Still worried about power lines and cancer? That’s so retro, says the New York Times. You’re just stuck in the 1980’s.  

This is what the “newspaper of record” wants you to know about the risk of childhood leukemia from power lines: A “fairly broad consensus among researchers holds that no significant threat to public health has materialized.”

The full message is told in a new 7+ minute video, produced by the Times’ RetroReport, which boasts a staff of 13 journalists and 10 contributors, led by Kyra Darnton. The video even credits a fact checker. What was missing is the common sense to do some digging when reporting on a controversial issue.

July 26, 2013

“Genotoxic Effects of Exposure to RF-EMF in HL-60 Cells Are Not Reproducible,” Mutation Research/Genetic Toxicology and Environmental Mutagenesis, posted online June 28, 2013, by a German team including Günter Speit and Rudolf Tauber.

“In conclusion, two independent attempts failed to reproduce genotoxic effects of RF-EMF in HL-60 cells as reported by the REFLEX project. These repeat experiments were performed under the same experimental conditions as the original experiments and one part of the repeat study was performed by the scientists who also generated the REFLEX data.”

June 3, 2008

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).

January 30, 2008

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.

September 26, 2007

Birds may actually be able to "see" a magnetic field. This is the fascinating and surprising conclusion of a group of German scientists who have been studying migratory birds. Not everyone is yet convinced that garden warblers can visualize the geomagnetic field (see today's news item on Nature.com), but the new German paper reminds us how little about we know about how living systems interact with electromagnetic signals.

February 5, 2007

The German Federal Office of Radiation Protection (BfS) has joined its Swedish counterpart in advising caution with respect to the use of mobile phones, following the release of the new Interphone brain tumor paper 

January 29, 2006

Is it a warning sign or a statistical fluke?

This is the question prompted by a new epidemiological study, released on Friday (January 27) which shows —once again— that one may be more than twice as likely to develop certain types of tumors after using a cell phone for more than ten years.

February 1, 2004

Wolfgang Löscher has suffered numerous personal attacks for his work on EMFs and breast cancer. But he struggled on, and now he may have resolved a fundamental problem in EMF research: Why different labs doing what appear to be identical experiments, produce conflicting results.

January 27, 2004

A court in El Paso, TX, ruled on January 26 that German soldiers who developed cancer after being exposed to X-ray radiation from radar components can pursue their claims against the manufacturers of the equipment, according to the German edition of the Deutsche Welle. The defendants include GE, Raytheon and Lucent.

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