Latest Cell Phone Brain Tumor Study
September 19... The French Interphone results are out and
they are not reassuring.
The French study team, which includes Elisabeth Cardis, who is in charge of the
overall Interphone project, has found high rates of
brain tumors (gliomas) among heavy cell phone users. It's not a significant
result, statistically speaking, but what is noteworthy is that this excess was
apparent regardless of the way a heavy user was defined. As the researchers
themselves put it: There is a "general tendency" for a greater glioma
risk for "long-term users, heavy users [and] users with the largest
numbers of telephones."
For example, those who owned more than one cell phone had twice the risk of
getting a glioma, as did those who had used a cell phone for the longest period
of time (over about four years). Those who were on a cell phone for the longest
total amount of time (260 hours or more) had 80% more gliomas, about the same
increase as those whose average cell phone call lasted the longest (over
five-and-a half minutes). And those who had made the most phone calls (over
5,100) had about 50% more gliomas. In each category, the heaviest user had the
highest risk.
There was no elevated risk for the two other types of brain tumors under study,
meningiomas and acoustic neuromas.
If the French results hold up, it would indicate that cell phone-induced brain
tumors can develop more quickly than current hypotheses suggest. Combined
analyses of the Interphone data from five European countries —Denmark, Finland,
Norway, Sweden, U.K.— point to a latency of ten years or more for both acoustic
neuroma and gliomas. And while a second team led by
Sweden's Lennart Hardell and Kjell Hansson Mild have reported a ten-year latency, some of their earlier
papers have pointed to shorter latencies (see for instance this 2003 paper).
The new study couldn't shed any light on ten-year tumor risks because the
French took to cell phones relatively late. The researchers note that in 1995,
five years before the Interphone project began, only 12% of the French
population had a mobile phone. As a result, the study included only four
individuals with any of the three types of brain tumors among the 350 cases and
455 controls who had used a cell phone for more than ten years. (By comparison,
close to 85% of the French population has a cell phone today.)
To be sure, the French Interphone study is limited by the small number of
people in the high exposure groups, but it provides yet another "slight hint" —the phrase (euphemism?) used
last week by Lawrie Challis— that we may have a major public health problem
brewing. Challis, the head of the U.K. mobile phone
health research program, was referring to the current state of knowledge upon the release of
his latest progress report.
The French team is delaying drawing any conclusions until the release of the
complete Interphone results with the combined data from the 13 participating
countries. That paper is already years late. The rest of us have no choice but
to wait along with them, but this continuing series of "hints" is
getting harder and harder to ignore.
The French paper was posted on the Internet on September 10 and will be
published in an upcoming issue of the Revue
d'Épidémiolgie et de Santé Publique [Epidemiology and Public Health]. The
paper is in French with an abstract in both French and English.
August 29... An international group of researchers has
thrown down the gauntlet. The Bioinitiative Working Group is challenging the
EMF power structure to set much stricter exposure standards for power lines,
cell phones, cell towers and other sources of electromagnetic radiation.
"'Business as usual' is unacceptable," says David Carpenter, the
director of the Institute for Health and the
Environment at New
York's University of Albany, on releasing the working group's extensive report.
Its general conclusion is that there are many biological effects at levels that
are well below current standards and that the "existing safety limits are
inadequate to protect public health." Carpenter and Cindy Sage, a consultant based in Santa
Barbara, CA, coordinated the Bioinitiative group and edited the report.
Among the group's key recommendations are:
• a 1mG limit for homes where children and/or pregnant women live;
• a "precautionary limit" of 0.1µW/cm² (0.6V/m) for RF exposures
where "people live, work and go to school."
These proposed levels are on the order of 1,000 times more stringent than
current limits adopted by ICNIRP and the IEEE's ICES.
In addition to Carpenter and Sage, the contributors to the report are: Carl
Blackman, Martin Blank, Guangdi Chen, Zoreh Davanipour, David Gee, Lennart
Hardell, Olle Johansson, Michael Kundi, Henry Lai, Kjell Hansson Mild, Gene
Sobel and Zhengping Xu. All 21 sections of the report are available as free
downloads from the Bioinitiative Web site.
Will those responsible for developing EMF policies on both the international
and national levels now review the Bioinitiative's findings and engage in a
dialogue over what the appropriate exposure limits should be? Or will they
simply ignore them and continue with business as usual? We think we know the
answer, but we're ready to be surprised.
August
10... Don't
hold your breath waiting for the U.S. to do more research on the possible
health effects of mobile phones.
After sitting through two and a half days of briefings at this week's National
Academy of Sciences workshop in Washington, we walked away thinking that it's unlikely that the
academy's report, due by the end of the year, will put a high priority on
initiating any new projects. The panel would have to make some strong
recommendations to prompt action because, at the moment, the federal government
has neither the will nor the money to revisit the RF-health controversy. For
its part, the cell phone industry has long argued that it wants health research
to come to an end.
Attendance at the meeting told the story. Other than the invited speakers and a
couple of representatives from the federal agencies, just a handful of people
bothered to show up. The wireless industry mostly skipped it —Motorola's Joe
Elder was one of the few exceptions. The press also took a pass. Only three
people spoke at the sessions reserved for public comments; two raised concerns
over phone towers. The third, Dave LeGrande of the Communications Workers of
America, addressed occupational health risks. None of the comments from the
floor made a case for more studies on cell phones.
America's declining standing in RF research was apparent by who was invited to
speak at the workshop. Of the 19 presentations, only seven were from the U.S.
In contrast, Finland, with a population of just over five million, contributed
two speakers, as well as one of the panel members.
If no new projects are recommended and funded, the only RF research that will
be carried out in the U.S. in the foreseeable future would be the animal
studies sponsored by the National Toxicology Program. These were first put on
the agenda eight years ago, and the actual cancer experiments are scheduled to
get underway about a year from now. This is a major effort, costing a total of
$22 million. About a third of this has already been spent on building the
exposure systems, according to David McCormick of IITRI in Chicago. He is the
running the study and is also a member of the NAS panel. Some at the meeting privately
questioned whether we should be putting all our research funds in one basket.
The one wild card that could change this bleak research outlook is the
long-delayed Interphone study. Two epidemiologists who are working on Interphone spoke at the
meeting, but both were tight-lipped about the results. In separate interviews,
they each refused to say anything about the observed long-term risks. Dan
Krewski of Canada's University of Ottawa predicted that the Interphone paper
would be out by the end of the year, while Anssi Auvinen of Finland's Tampere
School of Public Health suggested that next year was more likely. Neither would
say what is holding up its release, though it is becoming clear that the
disagreements within the Interphone study team are about more than just
copyediting.
If the final paper were to reinforce the already-published partial results,
which point to a higher incidence of brain tumors and acoustic neuromas among those
who have used phones for more than ten years (see for instance our January 22 news item), the current agenda could well be
revised. As FDA's Abiy Desta, who helped organize the meeting, told us,
"All interested parties will pay attention to Interphone."
From Louis Slesin