US National research council publishes new report on cellphone radiation

There has been a lot of debate recently on the health effects of miclrowave radiation including radiation from cellphones, mobile masts, microwave ovens, radar, and industrial apparatus.

This debate has been ongoing for over 30 years and the frontier sciences group has been on the forefront of research in this arera since 1970…we have published books, articles, and hundreds of internet posts in this area so if you want to learn more about this exciting–and controverrsial–area, there is a lot of material out there!

Today the US National Research Council (NRC) and National Academy of Sciences (NAS) have published a new report on the hazards of cellphone radiation and this has renewed the debate on the subject, hightlight once more the fact that so-called experts in the field are NOT in agreement, and that MORE RESEARCH is called for, which is welcome news for us researchers who are looking for funding!

Here in europe, the EU commission has support certain–but not all–rresearch in this area through the INTERPHONE research program under Framework Program 6, and I have commented this rersearch in more detail on the bioelectromagnetics research group on Yahoo tech groups for the last 6 years; more debate on this subject will be published soon, so keep tuned to frontier sciences for the latest buzz! http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bioelectromagnetics/

frontierscientist

January 17… The NAS-NRC report, released today (see January 15 below), presents a list of research needs to better understand the possible health effects of RF radiation. What’s missing is any sense of priorities. The NAS-NRC committee that prepared the report fails to indicate whether characterizing a child’s exposure from a cell phone is more important than doing an epidemiological study of children who use them; or whether mechanistic studies are more important than laboratory toxicology experiments.

"We were told not to put priorities on the research needs," Frank Barnes, the chair of the NAS-NRC panel, told Microwave News in a telephone interview from his office at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "They were quite strict about this." When asked who "they" were, Barnes replied that he is not sure whether the order came from the NAS-NRC or from the FDA, which requested the report. "It does not make much sense to me," Barnes said, "I would have defined our mission differently."

Another notable omission is a discussion of the results from the Interphone project. Barnes explained that this was because the final Interphone paper is not yet available. But that’s only part of the story. The report does comment on an Interphone methodological analysis —suggesting that selection bias would lead to underestimating the tumor risks— yet it does not acknowledge that published papers from a number of the participating countries, either alone or in a group, have found that long-term users of cell phones have higher rates of two types of tumors (acoustic neuromas and brain tumors). The Israeli study pointing to an increased risk of a third type of tumor, of the parotid gland, among heavy cell phone users came too late (December 6) to be included, according to Barnes.

The report does allow that, "The pending results of the Interphone study… are likely to have a major influence on the direction and scope of future research concerning the use of cellular phones and cancer." But why did the NAS-NRC panel not address the disquieting findings published to date? They too would have prompted an imperative to do more research, especially if the panel had noted that the Interphone results are largely consistent with the Swedish studies of Lennart Hardell and Kjell Hansson Mild.

Most close observers now believe that the epidemiological data show that a health risk from mobile phones can no longer be dismissed. (That’s what a senior and well-connected member of the bioelectromagnetic community told us recently.) No one involved with this new report, not the committee, not the NAS-NRC, not the FDA and certainly not the cell phone industry, which paid for it, had any interest in fostering a sense of urgency to step up the pace of health studies, especially in the U.S., where RF research is moribund.

The NAS-NRC committee may not have wanted to highlight the epi findings but it was not reticent about dismissing the controversial and, for many still unresolved, field of RF genotoxicity. The panel favored Vijayalaxmi’s and Joe Roti Roti’s view that RF radiation cannot cause DNA breaks, and thereby rejected the work of Henry Lai, among others. "[M]ost investigators in the field agree that no compelling body of evidence exists to support the hypothesis that RF fields are genotoxic," they wrote.

Other studies pointing to effects on DNA —such as those from Austria and China— are not cited. The only panel member with direct experience with the RF–DNA work is France’s Bernard Veyret, who has openly feuded with the Austrian group, led by Hugo Rüdiger at the University of Vienna. Score one for Veyret.

Lai, Roti Roti and Vijayalaxmi each gave a talk at a workshop hosted by the NAS-NRC panel last August (see our August 10 post). Barnes told us that the report was "mostly" based on what was presented at the August workshop. Who at the NAS-NRC selected the workshop speakers is not known. Barnes could not shed any light on this but said that, "We tried to have as much diversity of opinion as we could."

Nor is it clear who picked the reviewers of the committee’s report. What does come across is that the NAS-NRC was unmoved by those who urged it to limit industry influence. At the time the committee’s membership was made public, some asked that Leeka Kheifets, a long-time associate of EPRI, the research arm of the electric utility industry, be removed from the panel. The NAS-NRC not only rejected this appeal but later sought advice from another EPRI staffer, Gabor Mezei. The other surprising choice for a reviewer is Teri Vierima of Resources Strategies Inc., a consulting firm that lists EPRI and a host of wireless companies as clients.

Rick Jostes, the NAS-NRC study director, no doubt played a key role in selecting both the workshop speakers and reviewers of the panel’s report. Jostes, widely viewed as a skeptic of low-level RF biological effects, retired on December 31.

January 15… On Thursday, January 17, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council (NAS-NRC) will release its report on what types of research, if any, are needed to address potential health effects of radiation used for wireless communications. The report, which was requested by the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), marks the closing chapter of the cooperative research agreement (or CRADA) between the CTIA, the trade association of the cell phone and wireless industries, and the CDRH. The CTIA sponsored the project. Frank Barnes of the University of Colorado, Boulder, chaired the NAS-NRC committee that wrote the report. Back in June, the Center for Science in the Public Interest criticized the makeup of the panel for being too heavily weighted with physicists and engineers at the expense of biologists and for having ties to industry. The NAS-NRC hosted a workshop last summer to review gaps in knowledge of RF biological effects (see our August 10 comment.)

You can see these comments online at www.microwavenews.com

National Research Council calls for further studies on cellphone radiation

By Jeffrey Silva
Story posted: January 18, 2008 – 1:29 pm EDT on RCR wireless news:

A National Research Council report calls for more research into the potential health effects of long-term exposure to radiation emitted by cellphones and other wireless devices, with U.S. scientists anxious to gather more data on any risks posed to children, pregnant women and fetuses by handsets as well as base station antennas.

“Although it is unknown whether children are more susceptible to radio-frequency exposure, they may be at increased risk because of their developing organ and tissue systems,” the NRC stated in a press release. “Additionally, specific absorption rates for children are likely to be higher than for adults, because exposure wavelength is closer to the whole-body resonance frequency for shorter individuals. The current generation of children will also experience a longer period of RF field exposure from mobile-phone use than adults, because they will most likely start using them at an early age. The report notes that several surveys have shown a steep increase in mobile-phone ownership among children, but virtually no relevant studies of human populations at present examine health effects in this population.”

Government health experts in the United Kingdom and France have cautioned on mobile-phone use by children.

Much of the research conducted in the United States and overseas has examined the effects short-term exposure of mobile-phone radiation on healthy adults. The results have been mixed, thereby providing government health officials no definitive indication that cellphones are dangerous to the billions of mobile-phone subscribers around the world. Even so, cellular carriers and manufacturers have been hit with a slew of product liability lawsuits since the early 1990s, when the controversy first caught fire. The mobile-phone industry has not been found liable in any litigation to date, however.

The NAS report, sponsored by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, was not focused on potential health risks but rather on the current state of research and on how additional studies could further the understanding of how mobile phones interact with human biology.

The NAS noted, for example, that most studies have been based on pull-out linear rod antennas that are held against an individual’s ear. But since newer handsets have recessed, built-in antennas, NAS said additional SAR data are needed. NAS also said that because wireless technology is now used in laptop computers and other devices, the antennas are close to other parts of the body and thus needs to be investigated.