A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

Niels Kuster: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )

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.

November 29, 2021

The Bioelectromagnetics Society (BEMS) and the European BioElectromagnetics Association (EBEA), the two leading research groups in Western countries, will soon join together and become BioEM. Like its predecessors, the new society will be a forum on the interactions of all types of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields and radiation with living organisms. BioEM will be based in Zurich, Switzerland.

The move is hardly unexpected. Just the opposite. A union has been in the planning stages since at least 2016. Many favored a BEMS-EBEA consolidation even earlier, but it ran into one roadblock or another, at least partly because directors did not want to lose control.

February 16, 2021

Alexander Lerchl wanted a seat at the table and wanted it bad. It was 2010 and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was setting up a working group to assess the cancer risks of RF radiation. The meeting would be a landmark event with major long-term implications for the cell phone industry.

As it turned out, in May 2011, the working group voted, by a large margin, to classify RF, including cell phone radiation, as a possible human carcinogen. But that outcome was far from assured before its 30 members —from 14 countries— deliberated for eight days at IARC headquarters in Lyon, France.

Lerchl, a professor at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, was making a name for himself as a self-appointed debunker of claims of radiation health effects. Lerchl craved to be invited to Lyon, but IARC would not have him.

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.

September 25, 2020

Very little has been written in the popular media about the waveforms used in 5G signals. Two outstanding questions are: How fast are the pulses? How powerful are they?

In 2018, Esra Neufeld and Niels Kuster of the IT’IS Foundation in Zurich issued a warning in a...

September 17, 2019

The U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) will soon embark on a new phase of its long-running RF project. Last year, the NTP concluded that RF radiation causes cancer; now it will begin a systematic search for mechanisms to explain how and why the tumors developed. Work is expected to begin by the end of the year.

The research plan is wide-ranging. It will include studies on gene expression, oxidative stress and DNA damage and repair, as well as on the possible role played by heat. Other priorities on the NTP agenda are studies on behavior and stress.

November 30, 2018

“Systematic Derivation of Safety Limits for Time-Varying 5G RF Exposure Based on Analytical Models and Thermal Dose,” Health Physics, December 2018.

“Another conclusion of this study is that the current ICNIRP (1998) and IEEE (2005, 2010) guidelines urgently need to be revised, as the duty cycle of 1,000 currently tolerated can produce unacceptable temperature increases that may result in permanent tissue damage.” From IT’IS in Zurich.

June 25, 2015

Lancet Oncology, the journal which published the official announcement of IARC’s decision to designate RF radiation as a possible human carcinogen, has issued a correction to the conflict of interest (COI) statement it had included for...

November 14, 2013

“Experimental and Numerical Assessment of Low-Frequency Current Distributions from UMTS and GSM Mobile Phones,” Physics in Medicine and Biology, December 7, 2013, from Niels Kuster's group in Zurich.

“The LF fields [<20 kHz] generated by mobile phone battery currents are, thus, not compliant with the ICNIRP reference levels for normal use, i.e., at the head.”

August 15, 2011

What if you could treat cancer without surgery, without chemotherapy and without ionizing radiation? What if you could extend a dying patient's life by years without any side effects? And if the patient were in pain, you could get rid of that too? All that may be possible sooner than you think.

May 26, 2011

Niels Kuster may not have realized just how right he was when he warned that the Bioelectromagnetics Society (BEMS)  was "threatened" by its "biased scientific culture." It's threatened no more. BEMS has succumbed. In an ...

February 4, 2011

Publication bias is a well-known problem —it's defined in a recent, widely read New Yorker article as "the tendency of scientists and scientific journals to prefer positive data over null results, which is what happens when no effect is found." This may be generally true, but once again, the usual rules don't apply to EMFs. Here researchers (and editors) are all too often more interested in publishing failures than successes. Actually, for EMFs, failure is success,...

May 3, 2010

Fifteen years ago Om Gandhi pointed out that children are exposed to higher levels of radiation from cell phones than adults. He was right then and he is right today. Yet, no one could blame you for thinking otherwise.

In an article published in the May issue of Harper's, Nathaniel Rich uses this putative controversy, among a number of other examples, to make the case that confusion reigns in all aspects of cell-phone research. "The brain of a child absorbs a much greater amount of radiation from a cell phone than does the brain of an adult," he writes, adding immediately after, "No, it does not."

April 4, 2010

The bone marrow of young pigs has a higher water content than adult bone marrow and, as expected, Peyman and Gabriel found that it has a higher conductivity. A little math might help understand why a higher water content in tissues this leads to higher SARs. Start with the basic equation for calculating the SAR:

SAR = σ E2 / ρ

where σ = conductivity of the tissue; E = electric field, ρ = density of the tissue

More simply, this means that the SAR is proportional to the conductivity:

SAR σ

and therefore as the conductivity increases, so does the SAR.

February 9, 2009

Call it the end of an era. Motorola, which has by any measure been the dominant force in the RF health arena for more than 15 years, is stepping back from the fray. The field will never be quite the same again.

On Friday, February 13, Motorola will close down its RF research lab in Plantation, FL. C.K. Chou, Mark Douglas, Joe Elder, Joe Morrissey and their support staff have all lost their jobs. A few days later, Ken Joyner, another key player on RF regulatory affairs based in Australia, will leave Motorola after 12 years with the company.

July 22, 2008

The brains of young children absorb twice as much as RF energy from a cell phone as those of adults, according to a set of new calculations carried out by Joe Wiart's research group at France Telecom in the suburbs of Paris.

December 12, 2007

PERFORM-A is a washout. The eight-year, $10 million industry research project that was supposed to answer the question, "Does cellphone radiation cause cancer in animals?" instead promises to sow more confusion and mistrust.

September 24, 2007

The Swiss National Research Program on Non-Ionizing Radiation (NRP57) will hold a one-day wokshop, Dosimetry Meets Epidemiology, on January 11 in Zurich. The focus will be on exposure assessment in EMF epidemiology. Anders Ahlbom, Jørgen Bach Andersen, Alexander Borbély, Elisabeth Cardis and Yngve Hamnerius, all members of NRP57's steering committee, will chair the three sessions. Among those on the program are Joe Bowman of U.S. NIOSH, Niels Kuster of IT'IS, Mike Kelsh of Exponent and Martin Röösli of the University of Bern. There is only room for 60 attendees and we are told that half the spots are already taken. For more information, contact Christian Mottas at the Swiss National Science Foundation.

February 12, 2007

The Swiss National Science Foundation today officially launched its EMF research program, known as (NRP 57). The 5 million franc (U.S.$4 million) program is sponsoring 11 new laboratory, epidemiological, dosimetric and risk management studies. These include:
• The effects of pulsed mobile phone signals on the human brain and on cognitive function by Peter Achermann of the University of Zurich;
• The effects of 3G phone radiation on blood flow in the brain by Martin Wolf of the University Hospital, also in Zurich;
• An epidemiological survey on the health status of 2,000 people exposed to high-frequency radiation by Martin Röösli of the University of Berne;
In vivo and in vitro experiments on stress responses by Meike Mevissen, also of the University of Berne;
• Genotoxic studies on power-frequency EMFs by Primo Schär of the University of Basel;
• Three projects on dosimetry at the Foundation for Research on Information Technologies (IT'IS) in Zurich, which is run by Niels Kuster.
For the complete details, see the press release available in German and French; the program brochure, in German and French, as well as the program implementation plan in English, German and French.     

 

June 6, 2006

A Swiss research team led by Peter Achermann of the University of Zurich has failed to replicate the Dutch TNO study (see yesterday's post). Achermann and his collaborators, Martin Röösli of the University of Bern and Niels Kuster of the IT'IS Foundation in Zurich, found no consistent effects on well-being or cognitive performance following a 45-minute exposure to 3G RF radiation, at either a 1 V/m or a 10 V/m.

The radiation signals were designed to mimic those from a mobile phone base station. The experiments were run double blind —that is, neither the subjects nor the investigators knew when the power was turned on.

Pages

Subscribe to Niels Kuster: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )