NTP Lite: All Good in Korea Too
Letters to the Editor Are in the Works
Korean researchers working on NTP Lite have joined their Japanese collaborators in reporting no evidence of adverse effects among rats chronically exposed to cell phone radiation.
“Long-term exposure to CDMA-modulated 900 MHz RF was neither carcinogenic or genotoxic at an SAR of 4 W/Kg in male rats,” Young Hwan Ahn and coworkers write in Toxicological Sciences, the same journal that published the Japanese results a few days ago. The Korean paper was posted on January 16.
NTP Lite is a scaled down version of the U.S. NTP RF–cancer animal study. For background, go here.
The Japanese and Korean papers have prompted a raft of criticism. A number of letters to the editor of the journal are being prepared, Microwave News has been told.
“It’s very obvious that the objective of the paper is to neutralize the results of the NTP study,” Henry Lai, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, Seattle, said of the Japanese study. “The authors have lost their objectivity as scientists —and, sadly, they don’t seem to know much about RF science.”
The NTP Lite project, which got underway in 2019, is running far behind schedule. RF exposures were completed in 2022, followed by years of analysis.
One reason for the delay of the Korean experiment was the premature death of at least four of the RF-exposed rats. This led to the genotoxic component of the study being carried out separately. (See our report from June 2023.) The death of those rats remains unexplained.
The project was designed for the data from the two countries to be combined —to enhance statistical reliability. But, neither of the published papers addresses where that stands.
The full text of the Korean paper (abstract below) is open access, as is the Japanese paper.
