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Judge William Alsup upheld San Francisco’s right to “require disclosure of accurate and uncontroversial facts … alerting the public to a possible health risk and to its interest in suggesting precautionary steps to mitigate this risk.” The court noted “the FCC has never found that cell phones are absolutely safe.”

The court’s confusion over which group really speaks for the WHO is understandable, as there are two quite distinct groups involved. WHO established the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as its expert advisory group on carcinogens. This past May, after an exhaustive review, the IARC concluded that cell phone and other wireless radiation should be regarded as a possible carcinogen. Contrary to the court’s presumption, the category of possible carcinogen is one that merits very serious concern and cannot be dismissed as inconsequential.

There’s nothing on the IARC WHO list of possible carcinogens that anyone would ever let their kids play with. It includes many compounds for which major regulatory actions have been taken: Carbon Tetrachloride and carbon black, persistent chlorinated pesticides that have been banned from Bulgaria to Sweden, such as chlordane, heptachlor, kepone, DDT, Mirex, and moth balls (napathalene); agents used in warfare such as nitrogen mustard (poison gas), and a host of well recognized workplace hazards including PBBs, styrene, jet fuel, diesel fuel, mercury, and gasoline. The U.S. spends billions trying to prevent exposure to Human Papilloma Virus, another 2B possible carcinogen.

In dismissing the characterization of cellphone radiation as a potential hazard, the court relied on the website statement of the other voice of WHO, the Electromagnetic Field (EMF) group. WHO also has a separate program on electromagnetic fields which has been heavily influenced by industry. An intense battle is underway as we write this within the WHO for which voice should be heard, the IARC view or that of the EMF group. The Court cited the WHO/EMF group without appreciating that there is an ongoing intense discussion within WHO regarding what their site should say in light of the IARC determination that cellphone radiation is likely to be tied with cancer risk.

Finally, missing altogether from any discussion in this matter is the fact that evidence is mounting that cell phone radiation has a host of non-cancer impacts, including impeding male reproductive health. Istanbul Highlights.

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Environmental Health Trust Reveals Risky Patterns of Cell Phone Use by Middle Schoolers

November 9th, 2011

Important New Zealand paper and UK Charity MobileWise Scientific Review: Cell Phone Use Today Places Children At Risk Cited Among Several Reports

BERKELEY, CA – November 9, 2011 – Key figures in the arena of cell phone safety spoke today at a California City Council education forum in Berkeley. The impact of cell phones on children was a major theme of the day’s speeches. Devra Davis, PhD, MPH, founder of Environmental Health Trust (EHT), cited several studies, including a recent report that EHT coauthored, on radiofrequency exposure among children. She also highlighted an important new New Zealand study led by Mary Redmayne finding that in-pocket use of cell phones by middle schoolers exposes their reproductive organs’ to prolonged exposure to cell phone radiation. Additionally, she unveiled an important new UK report that calls for interventions to protect children from the long-term health risks of cell phone radiation.

Cell Phones and Children’ Heads

According to the EHT report, children absorb twice as much microwave radiation from cell phones as adults, and radiation from cell phones carried in shirts or pants pockets is four to seven times higher than the guidelines set by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which determines exposure guidelines in the United States.

The reason for the discrepancy, EHT says, is that the process to determine radiation exposure from cell phones involves the use of a mannequin model that approximates a 6-foot 2-inch tall, 220-pound man. Because this model head represents only about three percent of the population, the test will not accurately predict the radiation exposure of the other 97 percent, including children, nor does it estimate exposures from pocket use.

“The standard for cell phones has been developed based on old science, old models and old assumptions about how we use cell phones, and that’s why they need to change and protect our children and grandchildren,” said Dr. Davis.

Cell Phones and Sperm Damage

Dr. Davis also cited a New Zealand study led by researcher Mary Redmayne of the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Science at Victoria University in Wellington. Redmayne found that a majority of New Zealand adolescents carry a cell phone switched on in their pants pocket for more than six hours a day. Even where schools ban phones, more than two in five middle schoolers regularly sent texts from within a side pocket; a fifth carried one for more than 10 hours a day, and used it in-pocket. Research suggests this may impair future fertility and/or reproductive integrity.

According to the study, 43% of student participants admitted to breaking rules about cell phone use. A high-exposure group of risk-takers was identified for whom prohibited in-school use was positively associated with high texting rates, carrying the phone switched-on for more than 10 hours/day, and using them in-pocket.

The Redmayne team concluded that fertility research in humans finds important time and dose-dependent deleterious effects from cell phone exposure on sperm. Genotoxic effects have been demonstrated from “non-thermal” exposures, but not consistently. According to the study, there is sufficient evidence and expert opinion to warrant an enforced school policy removing cell phones from students during the day and promoting precautionary policies.

In response to the study’s findings, fertility expert, Ken McNatty, PhD, DSc, FRSNZ, a Professor of Cell Biology and Biotechnology at Victoria University of Wellington, NZ said “Doctors need to start asking patients with fertility problems about their cell phone use. It’s long been known that infertility in males or females can be caused by DNA damage to sperm or eggs, through exposure to X-irradiation or industrial chemicals. Now there is evidence to suggest that cell phone microwaves also cause DNA damage to sperm in a time- and dose-dependent manner.”

New Report Calls for More Safety

Dr. Davis also spoke about a new report published today by UK charity MobileWise, warning that children’s health is being jeopardized by the failure of government and phone companies to respond to the growing body of evidence linking cell phone use with health hazards. Dr. Davis and other public health experts working with MobileWise are calling on government and industry to respond to the new evidence, and to provide warnings and advice on ways to reduce the risk of health damage when using cell phones, especially for children.

The new report, “Mobile Phone Health Risks: The Case for Action to Protect Children,” brings together for the first time more than 200 peer-reviewed studies from a range of research institutions linking cell phones to serious health problems. These include brain tumors and potential damage to fertility, genes, the blood-brain barrier and melatonin production, as well as other biological effects thought to have a role in the development of cancer. Endorsed by a number of eminent doctors and scientists, the report highlights the growing and substantial body of evidence that has been obscured in the debate over these risks.

“It is better to be cautious now than it is to be sorry later,” said Dr. Davis. “We have learned this because of previous experience involving substances and products that were used indiscriminately for a long time until the health effects became undeniable. We do not want to see a future generation have to deal with fertility issues that can result from damage to sperm as well as female reproductive health. We want our children and grandchildren to have the right to produce healthy offspring when and if they chose to do so.”

The studies cited are all available on www.saferphonezone.com

About Environmental Health Trust

Environmental Health Trust (EHT) educates individuals, health professionals and communities about controllable environmental health risks and policy changes needed to reduce those risks. Current multi-media projects include: local and national campaigns to ban smoking and asbestos; working with international physician and worker safety groups to warn about the risks of inappropriate use of diagnostic radiation and cell phones, promoting research and awareness of environmental causes of breast cancer, and building environmental wellness programs in Wyoming and Pennsylvania to address the environmental impacts of energy development, the built environment and radon. EHT was created with the goal of promoting health and preventing disease one person, one community and one nation at a time. Capitalizing on growing public interest in Dr. Devra Lee Davis’s three popular books, When Smoke Ran Like Water, a National Book Award Finalist, The Secret History of the War on Cancer, and Disconnect–The Truth about Cell Phone Radiation, What Industry Has Done to Hide It and How to Protect Your Family, as well as recent documentary films, the foundation’s website offers clear, science-based information to prevent environmentally based disease and promote health, for the general public, children, and health professionals. For more information about getting involved in the numerous special projects spearheaded by the EHT, please log on to www.ehtrust.org.

A summary of the study can be seen here.

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Increasing Brain Cancer Incidence in Finland and Norway

November 1st, 2011

Click each image to enlarge.

Download full PDF here.

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NEW EVENT! Mark your calendars for Nov. 21! http://bit.ly/t0ibAF

October 29th, 2011

Garden City, NY – The Nassau Community College Cultural Program is proud to present “Cell Phones and Health — What We Know; How to Protect Yourself NOW!,” which will take place on Monday, November 21 at 2:00 p.m. in the College Center Building (CCB). The program will feature scientist, professor and author Dr. Devra Davis, M.P.H., Ph.D.

More.

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British Medical Journal’s Upcoming Cell Phone Study Deeply Flawed, Say Experts

October 20th, 2011

Updated Cell Phone Study Deeply Flawed, Say Experts

Environmental Health Trust and Other Experts Expose Major Flaws in New Danish Study Claiming No Significant Cancer Risks from Cell Phone Use.

“Unsurprising, biased and misleading,” says EHT President, cancer epidemiologist, Devra Davis, PhD, MPH

JACKSON, WY — October 20, 2011 EMBARGOED until 5:30 PM EST – A new study to be released online today “Use of mobile phones and risk of brain tumours: update of Danish cohort study,” in the British Medical Journal, claims “to show no link between mobile phone use and tumours.” However, the study is seriously flawed, say technical experts from the U.K., United States, Austria, Sweden and Australia, who have provided critical reviews on the embargoed study to Environmental Health Trust, a research and public educational group and ElectromagneticHealth.org, a health education and advocacy group in the United States.

The study, “Use of mobile phones and risk of brain tumours: update of Danish cohort study,” by Patrizia Frei et al., published online claims there is no link between long-term use of cell phones and tumors of the brain or central nervous system among 358,403 mostly male cell phone subscribers over the age of 30 during the period 1990-2007. The report is a follow-up to an earlier Danish analysis of the same group when the average use of cellphones was less than a decade that also reported no cell phone-cancer link.

Devra Davis, PhD, MPH, cancer epidemiologist and President of Environmental Health Trust, commented: “From the way it was set up originally, this deeply flawed study was designed to fail to find an increased risk of brain tumors tied with cellphone use. In order for any study of a relatively rare disease like brain tumors to find a change in risk, millions must be followed for decades. By extending an earlier analysis on the same group of cellphone users this new report provides unsurprising, biased and misleading conclusions. It uses no direct information on cell phone use, fails to consider recent and rapidly changing nature and exposure to microwave radiation from cellphones, cordless phones and other growing sources, and excludes those who would have been the heaviest users—namely more than 300,000 business people in the 1990s who are known to have used phones four times as much as those in this study.”

Highlights of the critique of the BMJ study are below:

The new report misrepresents risk of brain tumors for the very same reason the original Danish study was previously criticized. Removing more than 300,000 cell phone users who were business users from the analysis (almost 30% of the original group), defining as a user anyone making one call a week for 6 months, and ignoring the fact that phone calls were more expensive and shorter years ago, reduces the group’s average exposure and makes it very unlikely to find any evidence of increased risk.

Secondly, the report analyzed the rates of brain tumors that occurred between 1990-2007 in those who began using cellphones after 1987, compared to those who were non-subscribers when the study started. This also understates risk, because most of those who began as ‘non-subscribers’ to cell phone service (i.e. the ‘controls’ at the time the cohort was collected) became cell phone users later on, and accumulated almost as many years (on average per person) as the ‘exposed’ subscribers. Hence, the comparison to the population not contained in the subscriber sample is a comparison between two exposed groups. When Michael Kundi and colleagues from the Medical University of Vienna mathematically corrected for this concern in the earlier Danish study, they found a significantly increased risk for brain tumors.

Cell phone users who began using cell phones after 1995 and those under the age of 30 were not considered ‘subscribers’ in the study (as with the business users and pay-as-you go users), thus significantly diluting the results and underestimating the risk.

An accompanying editorial on the study by Anders Albom, notes several design limits of this study and repeats a concern raised about this problem in 2005, where he noted:

“Not being able to include corporate users, likely to be among the earliest and heaviest users of mobile phones, also weakens the statistical power of the study.” (See Page12: http://www.stralsakerhetsmyndigheten.se/Global/Publikationer/Rapport/Stralskydd/2005/ssi-rapp-2005-01.pdf).

Finally, and importantly, the current, updated Danish study being published today in fact did find increased risk, even though the study is currently being promoted to the media as if it did not. Davis notes

“Statistical significance tests are tools used in science to help understand the chance that a finding is real. In fact, the article reports a significant increased risk of a very rare form of glioma of the cerebral ventricle based on eight cases (2.58, 1.08-6. 1) but the authors chose to make no mention of this significant finding. In this instance despite the small number the finding is significant.”

“Statistical analyses provide tools, but do not provide rules, for interpreting evidence. This means that findings can be important even when they do not reach significance statistically. In this report, the authors reject all other findings of borderline significance completely. In a study of relatively rare diseases such as brain tumor, the failure to obtain statistical significance should not be confused with a lack of public health importance. In fact, most of the reported numbers of brain tumors in this article give estimated risks where the result goes from below 1 ( a negative result meaning no increased risk), to above 1 (a positive result indicating in some instances a doubled or greater risk).

“All of the few well-designed case-control studies of this issue have found significantly increased risk. Thus, these borderline findings of increased risk may well signal an important association.”

Commenting further on major flaws in this study, Alasdair Philips, an expert in electromagnetic health from Powerwatch in the U.K., has said of this study’s design,

“This study only looks at 7% of the Danish population who had a personal cellphone subscription for at least one year during the period 1987 to 1995. It ignores corporate subscribers (the heaviest users then) and the researchers have no data at all on cellphone use since 1995 so the extra 86% of the population who started to use a cellphone since 1996 were left in the “non subscriber part of the population. This study uses seriously flawed data to make a flawed analysis and should be condemned as misleading spin.”

Camilla Rees, MBA, Founder of ElectromagneticHealth.org and a seasoned campaigner on the issue says,

“This churning of the handicapped Danish cohort study is likely intended to counter the recent WHO IARC classification of cell phone radiation as a Class 2B ‘Possible Carcinogen’. The misrepresentation to the media evidenced here parallels the recent misleading CEFALO brain tumor study that purported to show that there is no higher risk of brain cancer in children. In fact, that study did find increased risk of brain tumors in children that the authors dismissed. But, experts in pediatric oncology understand that brain tumors in children could well occur in shorter time periods than in adults. The overlap in investigators in these two studies should also be noted.” (See Careful Analysis of Study Claiming No Brain Tumor Risk from Childhood Cell Phone Use Shows the Abstract and Conclusions Are Misleading http://electromagnetichealth.org/electromagnetic-health-blog/cefalo/ “)

The writer of the editorial commentary “Mobile telephones and brain tumours”, Ahlbom from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute has come under increased scrutiny himself for conflicts of interest.

Mona Nilsson, an investigative journalist from Sweden has documented a number of these conflicts. Ahlbom recently lost significant credibility when he was dismissed from the WHO’s IARC Expert Panel in May. Nilsson reported that he had failed to disclose links to the telecom industry.

“Ahlbom has been a member of the Board of his brother’s telecom consulting company, Gunnar Ahlbom AB. He also did not declare his industry affiliation to the Swedish Radiation Protection Authority, where he resigned after this disclosure. Ahlbom is a member of the International Commission on Nonionizing Radiation Protection (ICNRIP), an industry loyal organisation, and participated in setting the ICNIRP radiation exposure limits in 1998. These standards assume that the only biological impact of microwave radiation from cellphones is heat and fail utterly to take into effect non-thermal biological effects thereby greatly underestimating risk.

Nilsson says the authors also claim that almost 90% of the Swedish population had been using mobile phones for at least 7 years by 2009. “However typical usage was very low in 2002 because of relatively high prices per minute, compared to today as shown in a graph from the Swedish Post and Telecommunications Authority. The red curve is Millions of mobile phone minutes.”

Donald Maisch, PhD, of EMFacts Consultancy, Australia, who has researched the hidden and important influence of the telecommunications industry on radiofrequency standard setting around the world.

“If anything, this paper is evidence that the peer review process that this paper went through is inadequate. How could the glaring error of excluding corporate subscribers from the analysis be overlooked and the fact that all new subscribers post 1995 were relegated to being considered as non-users. As the old saying goes, “rubbish in rubbish out.”

Denis L Henshaw, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Human Radiation Effects, University of Bristol in U.K., echoes these concerns,

“This seriously flawed study misleads the public and decision makers about the safety of mobile phone use. I consider that their claims are worthless.”

URL of British Medical Journal paper once embargo is lifted: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/doi/10.1136/bmj.d6605

About Environmental Health Trust

Environmental Health Trust (EHT) educates individuals, health professionals and communities about controllable environmental health risks and policy changes needed to reduce those risks. Capitalizing on growing public interest in award-winning cancer epidemiologist and toxicologist, Dr. Devra Lee Davis’s popular books, including Disconnect–The Truth about Cell Phone Radiation, What Industry Has Done to Hide It and How to Protect Your Family, the foundation’s website offers clear, science-based information to prevent environmentally based disease and promote health, for the general public, children, and health professionals. For more information about the renowned scientific advisors to EHT and numerous special projects please log on towww.ehtrust.org.

About ElectromagneticHealth.org

ElectromagneticHealth.org is a health education and advocacy group focused on the biological and health effects of electromagnetic fields. It was founded by former investment banker Camilla Rees, MBA, who is also co-author of “Public Health SOS: The Shadow Side of the Wireless Revolution” and founder of Campaign for Radiation Free Schools and co-founder of the International EMF Alliance.

Contact:

Janet Vasquez

The Investor Relations Group

(212) 825-3210

jvasquez@investorrelationsgroup.com

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New study shows cell phones exceed FCC exposure limits by as much as double for children

October 16th, 2011

A scholarly article on cell phone safety published online October 17, 2011, in the journal Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine reports the finding that cell phones used in the shirt or pants pocket exceed FCC exposure guidelines and that children absorb twice as much microwave radiation from phones as do adults.

The paper, titled “Exposure Limits: The underestimation of absorbed cell phone radiation, especially in children,” notes that the industry-designed process for evaluating microwave radiation from phones results in children absorbing twice the cellphone radiation to their heads, up to triple in their brain’s hippocampus and hypothalamus, greater absorption in their eyes, and as much as 10 times more in their bone marrow when compared to adults.

The paper’s authors include three team members at Environmental Health Trust: Devra Davis, PhD, MPH, Founder and President; L. Lloyd Morgan, Senior Science Fellow; and Ronald B. Herberman, MD, Chairman of the Board.

The existing process is based on a large man whose 40 brain tissues are assumed to be exactly the same. A far better system relies on anatomically based models of people of various ages, including pregnant women, that can determine the absorbed radiation in all tissue types, and can account for the increased absorption in children. It allows for cell phones to be certified with the most vulnerable users in mind—children—consistent with the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” (ALARA) approach taken in setting standards for using radiological devices.

In the United States, the FCC determines maximum allowed exposures. Many countries, especially European Union members, use the “guidelines” of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), a non-governmental agency.

Three additional authors contributed to the paper: Om P. Gandhi, ScD, of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Utah; Alvaro Augusto de Salles, PhD, of the Electrical Engineering Department at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil; and Yueh-Ying Han, PhD, of the Department of Epidemiology and Community Health at New York Medical College. Drs. Gandhi and De Salles serve on EHT’s Scientific Advisory Group.

Click here to a view a summary of the paper

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