A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

News & Comment

IARC Welcomes Industry to RF–Cancer Review

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has invited three industry operatives to sit in on its weeklong assessment of the cancer risks associated with exposure to wireless radiation and other sources of RF/microwave radiation. Representatives from CTIA, the Wireless Association, the Mobile Manufacturers Forum (MMF) and the GSMA will all be allowed to attend the IARC review. The meeting will be held in Lyon, France, May 24-31.

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Connecting the Dots: Putting the Volkow Brain Scans in Perspective

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

"Cell Phones Affect Brain Activity." That headline has appeared all over the world since Nora Volkow published a PET scan of a brain lit up by a cell phone last month. Her colorful graphics, published in the high impact Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), guaranteed Volkow a large and attentive audience. But all the hoopla shouldn't obscure the fact that for more than a decade many others, notably Peter Achermann's group at the University of Zurich, have shown similar types of radiation-induced changes in the brain as well as much more.

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Cell Phone Radiation Changes Brain Metabolism

Low-Level Effects Get a Boost

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

A well-regarded and influential team of researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Brookhaven National Lab (BNL) is on the brink of resolving a long-standing dispute with enormous implications for public health. In a paper due out tomorrow, Nora Volkow and coworkers are reporting that cell phone radiation can affect the normal functioning of the human brain.

Whether these short-term changes will lead to health consequences (and what they might be) is far from clear — though Volkow already has preliminary indications of a long-term effect. Nor is the mechanism of interaction yet known. But the new finding, if confirmed, would at the very least force a rethink of the prevailing orthodoxy, which maintains that low levels of RF and microwave radiation are too weak to have any effect and can be disregarded.

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Game Changer?

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

It's only a short letter buried in the back pages of a journal, but it could change the entire cell phone–cancer controversy.

A group at Hebrew University in Jerusalem has reported a sharp increase in the incidence of parotid gland tumors in Israel over the last 30 years. Rakefet Czerninski, Avi Zini and Harold Sgan-Cohen found that these tumors have quadrupled since 1970, "with the steepest increase" after 2001 (see plot below). Their letter appears in the January 2011 issue of Epidemiology; it's a free download. They are with the Hadassah School of Dental Medicine at the university.

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Sam Milham: An Appreciation

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

John Snow is known as the father of modern epidemiology, best remembered for helping end the 1854 cholera epidemic in London. At the time no one yet knew that cholera is caused by bacteria, but Snow had long suspected that it was transmitted by food or water. In the hard-hit neighborhood of Soho where hundreds had died, Snow mapped the location of the homes of the victims and could see that most lived near the Broad Street water pump (see image below). Snow was able to persuade local officials to remove the handle of the pump and soon the epidemic subsided.

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Short Takes

NCI ‘Cancer Bioelectricity’ Conference

August 26, 2024

On September 12^th, the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) will host a conference on cancer bioelectricity via Zoom. Attendance is free, but registration is required.

Michael Levin, a professor of biology and biomedical engineering at Tufts University in Massachusetts, will be the keynote speaker.

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Another WHO RF Review Challenged

August 21, 2024

Last updated December 13, 2024

A third RF systematic review commissioned by the World Health Organization’s EMF Project is under fire. This one is on RF–induced oxidative stress.

Last month, two other WHO reviews —on pregnancy outcomes and on tinnitus— were both called into question as critics called for them to be retracted.

A team of 14 from six countries, led by Felix Meyer of the German Office for Radiation Protection (BfS), identified 11,599 studies on oxidative stress in the frequency range 800-2450 MHz. They then eliminated 11,543 of them as not meeting their criteria for inclusion.

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Italy’s 6 V/m RF Limit at Risk

March 14, 2024

The International Commission on the Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields (ICBE-EMF) has written to Italian government officials to support the country’s strict 6 V/m RF exposure limit.

The letter, dated March 13, expresses “great concern” that the standard might be weakened. It is signed by Ronald Melnick, the chair of ICBE-EMF, and by Elizabeth Kelley, its managing director.

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“NTP Lite”: Update from Japan

March 12, 2024

The Japanese group running a partial repeat of the NTP RF cancer study has not observed genotoxic effects among male rats exposed to 900 MHz CDMA radiation at 4 W/Kg, according to a paper to be presented tomorrow at the annual meeting of the Society of Toxicology in Salt Lake City, UT (SOT2024).

The analysis of the cancer data is ongoing and will not be reported.

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Schwannoma Puzzle

September 14, 2023

Last updated September 16, 2023

Three medical doctors have published a case report of a 40-year-old Italian man who developed a tumor in his thigh, near where he “habitually” kept his smartphone in a trouser pocket.

The case was published at the end of August in Radiology Case Reports, a peer-reviewed, open access journal.

The tumor, a painless mass, gradually expanded in the man’s left thigh over a period of six months, they wrote.

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Korean NTP Lite: Progress Report

June 16, 2023

Last updated June 17, 2023

A Korean RF genotoxicology study —part of a joint project with Japan— has been delayed due to the unexpected death of four of the RF–exposed rats early in the accompanying two-year cancer experiment, according to Young Hwan Ahn of Ajou University medical school.

Ahn presented a progress report on the Korean arm of the project in Geneva last week at a meeting of the WHO EMF Project’s International Advisory Committee. Microwave News has obtained a copy of Ahn’s PowerPoint presentation.

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A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

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Low-Level Effects Get a Boost

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