Brundtland Responds: Rarely Uses a Cell Phone

Gro Harlem Brundtland very rarely uses a cell phone, contrary to the impression promoted by the Norwegian Minister of Health that she is no longer electrosensitive, according to a message from Brundtland herself. Brundtland, a medical doctor, is a former prime minister of Norway and was the director of the WHO from 1998 to 2003.

“In her daily work, Gro Harlem Brundtland uses a PC with a cabled, not wireless, Internet connection. Second, she uses a mobile device —a Blackberry— for e-mail. She avoids speaking on cell phones, but has done so a very small number of times,” reads a statement released by Brundtland's press assistant over the weekend. The message was sent to Thomas Ergo, a reporter for Aftenbladet, a Norwegian newspaper, who broke the story late last week. (See also our report.)

“Brundtland's comments are the first time she has talked to the press about her electrosensitivity in 11 years,” Ergo noted in an e-mail to Microwave News.

Ergo's follow-up article on Brundtland ran in Aftenbladet yesterday under the headline, “I Avoid Talking on Mobile Phones.”

Ergo asked Jonas Gahr Støre, the health minister, whether he had misrepresented Brundtland in an effort to promote government policy that RF radiation is safe and causes no ill effects. Støre denied the charge, adding that his views on RF are based on the scientific advice he receives.

Støre was referring to a report of an expert committee, released last November, which concluded in part: “The large total number of studies provides no evidence that exposure to weak RF fields causes adverse health effects.” The 16 members of the committee include some well-known members of the RF research community including: Norway's Lars Klæboe, Gunnhild Oftedal and Tore Tynes as well as Sweden's Maria Feychting, Yngve Hamnerius and Lena Hillert.

At the time, Ergo asked how the government could assure the public that RF radiation was safe after the IARC decision that it was a possible human carcinogen. The chairman of the panel, Jan Alexander, told Ergo that "a fairly large minority [of the IARC committee] disagreed with the conclusion." As for Interphone study, Alexander said that it is only a single study pointing to a tumor risk. Alexander is the deputy director-general of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

In fact, the IARC decision was nearly unanimous and was based on both the Interphone and the Lennart Hardell studies —though many members of the Norwegian expert panel, especially the Swedes, are openly hostile to Hardell and his work.

In May of this year, the Norwegian department of health and human services released its own report whose conclusions were identical to those of its expert committee. The headline on that news story was: “Government: Mobile Radiation Does Not Harm or Bother You.”

For more on the Norwegian expert panel and Brundtland's electrosensitivity, see Ergo's article in Plot, published last year, and our coverage.

August 15, 2015

In a 45-minute interview spanning a wide array of topics, Brundtland once again addresses her electrosensitivity. The headline in yesterday’s Aftenposten, reads, in English, “My Body Has Responded to Mobile Radiation for 25 Years.” She advises people not to carry their phones in their pockets.