Interphone 2.0 is underway
October 3... Interphone 2.0 is underway. This
second phase of the Interphone project is investigating the
possible link between brain tumors and occupational exposures to various types
of EMFs —not just those from mobile phones— as well as to chemicals.
Like its predecessor, the new Interphone study is being run by Elisabeth
Cardis, who heads the radiation group at the International Agency for Research
on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France. This time, however, the U.S.
is participating. In fact, the U.S. National Institutes of Health is paying for
the entire $1.4 million, three-year project.
Joe Bowman at NIOSH in Cincinnati is leading the American
contingent. Bowman has developed a job-exposure matrix, which can help
translate the job histories collected in the Interphone questionnaires into
indices of exposure to chemicals and EMFs, at both power-line and RF
frequencies. Bowman, together with collaborators at the University of
Washington, Seattle, recently published a detailed description of the exposure matrix. (An earlier
version was applied in a study of neurodegenerative diseases.) A
second job-exposure matrix developed in Finland will also be used.
While 13 countries are participating in the original Interphone study —which
got underway in 2000 and is still not completed— only eight of them are working
on the occupational study: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, New
Zealand, Sweden and the U.K. Because the U.S. was not part of the original
project, none of the cases or controls in the new study is American.
Interphone 2.0 is the largest study of brain tumors and occupational exposures
to EMFs and chemicals ever undertaken.