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The Interphone
saga gets weirder and weirder
Dear Colleagues:
Once again, the leaders of the EMF community have issued a report that gives a misleading impression of the tumor risks associated with long-term cell phone use.
Please take a look at our latest post at
http://www.microwavenews.com
Louis Slesin, PhD
Editor, Microwave News
A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation
Phone: +1 (212) 517-2800; Fax: +1 (212) 734-0316
E-mail: <mwn@pobox.com>
Internet: <http://www.microwavenews.com>
Mail: 155 East 77th Street, Suite 3D
New York, NY 10075, U.S.A.
March 14… The Interphone
saga gets weirder and weirder. The latest chapter comes with the
release, earlier this week, of a status report on EMFs and health by
the Swedish Radiation Protection Authority (SSI).
Recent
Research on EMF Health Risks, the fifth annual report by an
independent expert group, covers what was learned about various types
of EMFs, from ELF to RF, in 2007. Here we address only what it says
about the latest Interphone results —or more precisely, what it
does not say.
For reasons that we cannot begin to
understand, the group headed by Anders
Ahlbom of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm never mentions
what is arguably the most important cell phone study published last
year: the Lahkola study, an analysis of the Interphone data from five
northern European countries. It points to a long-term risk of a brain
tumor on the side of the head the phone was used. (See our post
of January 22, 2007).
It is impossible that the SSI panel did
not know of this meta-analysis. The second author of Lahkola, Anssi
Auvinen of Finland's University of Tampere, is a member of the panel,
and the Karolinska's Maria Feychting, another Lahkola coauthor, is
its scientific secretary. Indeed, Ahlbom is himself associated with
the Interphone project and could hardly be unaware of Lahkola.
The
Lahkola study was posted online on January 17, 2007 —at the
very beginning of the year. For a moment, we thought it might have
been included in last year's SSI report.
Not so.
Nor was the Lahkola paper the only Interphone study
to be ignored by the SSI committee. The French
and Israeli
papers were also somehow left out. Both indicate a possible long-term
tumor risk. (We do allow that the Israeli study was published in
December when this report was being finished, though we suspect that
Auvinen and Feychting as members of the Interphone project would
likely have been aware of those results and the fact that they would
soon be published.)
The panel did cite two new Interphone
studies —a German
one on acoustic neuroma and Norwegian
one on brain tumors. Neither showed an elevated risk.
Why
were the three Interphone papers suggesting cell-phone tumor risks
shunted aside while those showing no risks included? Is this about
the power of money to keep the lid on the cell phone health debate?
Is this about political interference?
Whoever or whatever is
responsible, it goes much deeper than Sweden's SSI. Of the seven
members of the panel, five have strong ties to ICNIRP:
Three are members of the commission (Ahlbom, U.K.'s Richard
Saunders and France's Bernard
Veyret), and two others are members of its standing committees
(Finland's Jukka
Juutilianen and U.S.' Leeka
Kheifets). The report is a reflection of the leadership of the
EMF community and it indicates a need for change.
But first,
we need an answer to the question: How could these studies have
possibly been ignored?
[ http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=tumor
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=Interphone
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=Anders+Ahlbom
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=Auvinen
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=Feychting
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=Bernard+Veyret
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=Leeka+Kheifets
]
