In het hieronder opgenomen artikel
geschreven door Mark Hertsgaard en Mark Dowie en eerder geplaatst op
The Nation (hier de link naar het origineel), wordt aangetoond dat
de fabrikanten van mobiele telefoons en de netwerkbeheerders willens en wetens
wetenschappers betaalden voor hen gunstige uitkomsten uit onderzoek
naar straling van mobile telefoons....... Echter zoals het onderzoek naar het gebruik van tabak en fossiele brandstoffen verging, vonden
een aantal van deze wetenschappers wel degelijk bewijzen voor negatieve beïnvloeding van de hersenen door de straling, overigens kan door diezelfde straling ook het
DNA beschadigd worden......
De Wereldgezondheidsorganisatie (WHO) waarschuwt en stelt dat straling van mobiele telefoons 'mogelijk' kankerverwekkend kan zijn....... Zo zie je nog maar eens de werking van lobbyisme in de WHO, de lobby van netwerkbeheerders en fabrikanten van mobiele telefoons.......
In feite zijn een paar miljard mensen alleen door de mobiele telefoon te gebruiken, onderdeel geweest van een gezondheidsonderzoek, daar nooit van te voren een onderzoek werd ingesteld naar negatieve gezondheidseffecten door het gebruik van deze telefoons........
In feite zijn een paar miljard mensen alleen door de mobiele telefoon te gebruiken, onderdeel geweest van een gezondheidsonderzoek, daar nooit van te voren een onderzoek werd ingesteld naar negatieve gezondheidseffecten door het gebruik van deze telefoons........
Lees het volgende ontluisterende
artikel ajb en neem het zekere voor het onzekere: gebruik je telefoon
met 'oortjes' en microfoon, dus niet tegen je hoofd en zegt het
voort! (en doe je telefoon niet in je broekzak...)
How
Big Wireless Made Us Think That Cell Phones Are Safe: A Special
Investigation
The disinformation campaign—and massive radiation increase—behind the 5G rollout.
Things
didn’t end well between George Carlo and Tom Wheeler; the last time
the two met face-to-face, Wheeler had security guards escort Carlo
off the premises. As president of the Cellular Telecommunications and
Internet Association (CTIA), Wheeler was the wireless industry’s
point man in Washington. Carlo was the scientist handpicked by
Wheeler to defuse a public-relations crisis that threatened to
strangle his infant industry in its crib. This was back in 1993, when
there were only six cell-phone subscriptions for every 100 adults in
the United States. But industry executives were looking forward to a
booming future.
Remarkably,
cell phones had been allowed onto the US consumer market a decade
earlier without any government safety testing. Now, some customers
and industry workers were being diagnosed with cancer. In January
1993, David
Reynard sued the NEC America Company,
claiming that his wife’s NEC phone caused her lethal brain tumor.
After Reynard appeared on national TV, the story went viral. A
congressional subcommittee announced an investigation; investors
began dumping their cell-phone stocks; and Wheeler and the CTIA swung
into action.
A
week later, Wheeler announced that his industry would pay for a
comprehensive research program. Cell phones were already safe,
Wheeler told reporters; the new research would simply “re-validate
the findings of the existing studies.”
George
Carlo seemed like a good bet to fulfill Wheeler’s mission. He was
an epidemiologist who also had a law degree, and he’d conducted
studies for other controversial industries. After a study funded by
Dow Corning, Carlo had declared that breast implants posed only
minimal health risks. With chemical-industry funding, he had
concluded that low levels of dioxin, the chemical behind the Agent
Orange scandal, were not dangerous. In 1995, Carlo began directing
the industry-financed Wireless Technology Research project (WTR),
whose eventual budget of $28.5 million made it the best-funded
investigation of cell-phone safety to date.
Outside
critics soon came to suspect that Carlo would be the front man for an
industry whitewash. They cited his dispute
with Henry Lai,
a professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington, over a
study that Lai had conducted examining whether cell-phone radiation
could damage DNA. In 1999, Carlo and the WTR’s general counsel sent
a letter to the university’s president urging that Lai be fired for
his alleged violation of research protocols. Lai accused the WTR of
tampering with his experiment’s results. Both Carlo and Lai deny
the other’s accusations.
Critics
also attacked what they regarded as the slow pace of WTR research.
The WTR was merely “a confidence game” designed to placate the
public but stall real research, according to
Louis Slesin, editor of the trade publication Microwave
News.
“By dangling a huge amount of money in front of the cash-starved
[scientific] community,” Slesin argued, “Carlo guaranteed silent
obedience. Anyone who dared complain risked being cut off from his
millions.” Carlo denies the allegation.
Whatever
Carlo’s motives might have been, the documented fact is that he and
Wheeler would eventually clash bitterly over the WTR’s findings,
which Carlo presented to wireless-industry leaders on February 9,
1999. By that date, the WTR had commissioned more than 50 original
studies and reviewed many more. Those studies raised “serious
questions” about cell-phone safety, Carlo told a closed-door
meeting of the CTIA’s board of directors, whose members included
the CEOs or top officials of the industry’s 32 leading companies,
including Apple, AT&T, and Motorola.
Carlo
sent letters to each of the industry’s chieftains on October 7,
1999, reiterating that the WTR’s research had found the following:
“The risk of rare neuro-epithelial tumors on the outside of the
brain was more than doubled…in cell phone users”; there was an
apparent “correlation between brain tumors occurring on the right
side of the head and the use of the phone on the right side of the
head”; and “the ability of radiation from a phone’s antenna to
cause functional genetic damage [was] definitely positive….”
Carlo
urged the CEOs to do the right thing: give consumers “the
information they need to make an informed judgment about how much of
this unknown risk they wish to assume,” especially since some in
the industry had “repeatedly and falsely claimed that wireless
phones are safe for all consumers including children.”
The
World Health Organization classifies cell-phone radiation as a
“possible” carcinogen.
The
very next day, a livid Tom Wheeler began publicly trashing Carlo to
the media. In a letter he shared with the CEOs, Wheeler told Carlo
that the CTIA was “certain that you have never provided CTIA with
the studies you mention”—an apparent effort to shield the
industry from liability in the lawsuits that had led to Carlo’s
hiring in the first place. Wheeler charged further that the studies
had not been published in peer-reviewed journals, casting doubt on
their validity.
Wheeler’s
tactics succeeded in dousing the controversy. Although Carlo had in
fact repeatedly briefed Wheeler and other senior industry officials
on the studies, which had indeed undergone peer review and would soon
be published, reporters on the technology beat accepted Wheeler’s
discrediting of Carlo and the WTR’s findings. (Wheeler would go on
to chair the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the
wireless industry. He agreed to an interview for this article but
then put all of his remarks off the record, with one exception: his
statement that he has always taken scientific
guidance from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 'which, he said, “has concluded, ‘the weight of scientific
evidence had not linked cell phones with any health problems.’”)
Why, after such acrimony, Carlo was allowed to make one last appearance before the CTIA board is a mystery. Whatever the reason, Carlo flew to New Orleans in February 2000 for the wireless industry’s annual conference, where he submitted the WTR’s final report to the CTIA board. According to Carlo, Wheeler made sure that none of the hundreds of journalists covering the event could get anywhere near him.
When Carlo arrived, he was met by two seriously muscled men in plain clothes; the larger of the two let drop that he had recently left the Secret Service. The security men steered Carlo into a holding room, where they insisted he remain until his presentation. When summoned, Carlo found roughly 70 of the industry’s top executives waiting for him in silence. Carlo had spoken a mere 10 minutes when Wheeler abruptly stood, extended a hand, and said, “Thank you, George.” The two muscle men then ushered the scientist to a curbside taxi and waited until it pulled away.
In
the years to come, the WTR’s cautionary findings would be
replicated by numerous other scientists in the United States and
around the world, leading the World Health Organization in 2011 to
classify cell-phone radiation as a “possible” human carcinogen
and the governments of Great Britain, France, and Israel to issue
strong warnings on cell-phone use by children. But as the taxi
carried Carlo to Louis Armstrong International Airport, the scientist
wondered whether his relationship with the industry might have turned
out differently if cell phones had been safety-tested before being
allowed onto the consumer market, before profit took precedence over
science. But it was too late: Wheeler and his fellow executives had
made it clear, Carlo told The
Nation,
that “they would do what they had to do to protect their industry,
but they were not of a mind to protect consumers or public health.”
This
article does not argue that cell phones and other wireless
technologies are necessarily dangerous; that is a matter for
scientists to decide. Rather, the focus here is on the global
industry behind cell phones—and the industry’s long campaign to
make people believe that cell phones are safe.
As
happened earlier with Big Tobacco and Big Oil, the wireless
industry’s own scientists privately warned about the risks.
That
campaign has plainly been a success: 95 out of every 100 adult
Americans now own a cell phone; globally, three out of four adults
have cell-phone access, with sales increasing every year. The
wireless industry is now one of the fastest-growing on Earth and one
of the biggest, boasting annual sales of $440 billion in 2016.
Carlo’s
story underscores the need for caution, however, particularly since
it evokes eerie parallels with two of the most notorious cases of
corporate deception on record: the campaigns by the tobacco and
fossil-fuel industries to obscure the dangers of smoking and climate
change, respectively. Just as tobacco executives were privately told
by their own scientists (in the 1960s) that smoking was deadly, and
fossil-fuel executives were privately told by their own scientists
(in the 1980s) that burning oil, gas, and coal would cause a
“catastrophic” temperature rise, so Carlo’s testimony reveals
that wireless executives were privately told by their own scientists
(in the 1990s) that cell phones could cause cancer and genetic
damage.
Carlo’s
October 7, 1999, letters to wireless-industry CEOs are the
smoking-gun equivalent of the
November 12, 1982, memo that
M.B. Glaser, Exxon’s manager of environmental-affairs programs,
sent to company executives explaining that burning oil, gas, and coal
could raise global temperatures by a destabilizing 3 degrees Celsius
by 2100. For the tobacco industry, Carlo’s letters are akin to the
1969 proposal that
a Brown & Williamson executive wrote for countering anti-tobacco
advocates. “Doubt is our product,” the memo declared. “It is
also the means of establishing a controversy…at the public level.”
Like their tobacco and fossil-fuel brethren, wireless executives have chosen not to publicize what their own scientists have said about the risks of their products. On the contrary, the industry—in America, Europe, and Asia—has spent untold millions of dollars in the past 25 years proclaiming that science is on its side, that the critics are quacks, and that consumers have nothing to fear. This, even as the industry has worked behind the scenes—again like its Big Tobacco counterpart—to deliberately addict its customers. Just as cigarette companies added nicotine to hook smokers, so have wireless companies designed cell phones to deliver a jolt of dopamine with each swipe of the screen.
This Nation investigation
reveals that the wireless industry not only made the same moral
choices that the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries did; it also
borrowed from the same public-relations playbook those industries
pioneered. The playbook’s key insight is that an industry doesn’t
have to win the scientific argument about safety; it only has to keep
the argument going. That amounts to a win for the industry, because
the apparent lack of certainty helps to reassure customers, even as
it fends off government regulations and lawsuits that might pinch
profits.
Central
to keeping the scientific argument going is making it appear that not
all scientists agree. Again like the tobacco and fossil-fuel
industries, the wireless industry has “war gamed” science, as a
Motorola internal memo in 1994 phrased
it. War-gaming science involves playing offense as well as defense:
funding studies friendly to the industry while attacking studies that
raise questions; placing industry-friendly experts on advisory bodies
like the World Health Organization; and seeking to discredit
scientists whose views depart from the industry’s.
Funding
friendly research has perhaps been the most important component of
this strategy, because it conveys the impression that the scientific
community truly is divided. Thus, when studies have linked wireless
radiation to cancer or genetic damage—as Carlo’s WTR did in 1999;
as the WHO’s
Interphone study did in 2010;
and as the
US National Toxicology Program did in 2016—industry
spokespeople can point out, accurately, that other studies disagree.
“[T]he overall balance of the evidence” gives no cause for alarm,
asserted Jack Rowley, research and sustainability director for the
Groupe Special Mobile Association (GSMA), Europe’s wireless trade
association, speaking
to reporters about the WHO’s findings.
A
closer look reveals the industry’s sleight of hand. When Henry Lai,
the professor whom Carlo tried to get fired, analyzed 326
safety-related studies completed between 1990 and 2005, he learned
that 56 percent found a biological effect from cell-phone radiation
and 44 percent did not; the scientific community apparently was
split. But when Lai recategorized the studies according to their
funding sources, a different picture emerged: 67 percent of the
independently funded studies found a biological effect, while a mere
28 percent of the industry-funded studies did. Lai’s findings were
replicated by a
2007 analysis in Environmental
Health Perspectives that
concluded industry-funded studies were two and a half times less
likely than independent studies to find a health effect.
One
key player has not been swayed by all this wireless-friendly
research: the insurance industry. The
Nation has
not been able to find a single insurance company willing to sell a
product-liability policy that covered cell-phone radiation. “Why
would we want to do that?” one executive chuckled before pointing
to more than two dozen lawsuits outstanding against wireless
companies, demanding a total of $1.9 billion in damages. Some judges
have affirmed such lawsuits, including a judge
in Italy who refused to allow industry-funded research as evidence.
Even
so, the industry’s neutralizing of the safety issue has opened the
door to the biggest, most hazardous prize of all: the proposed
revolutionary transformation of society dubbed the “Internet of
Things.” Lauded as a gigantic engine of economic growth, the
Internet of Things will not only connect people through their
smartphones and computers but will connect those devices to a
customer’s vehicles and home appliances, even their baby’s
diapers—all at speeds faster than can currently be achieved.
Billions
of cell-phone users have been subjected to a public-health experiment
without informed consent.
There
is a catch, though: The Internet of Things will require augmenting
today’s 4G technology with 5G, thus “massively increasing” the
general population’s exposure to radiation, according to a
petition signed by 236 scientists worldwide who
have published more than 2,000 peer-reviewed studies and represent “a
significant portion of the credentialed scientists in the radiation
research field,” according to Joel Moskowitz, the director of the
Center for Family and Community Health at the University of
California, Berkeley, who helped circulate the petition.
Nevertheless, like cell phones, 5G technology is on the verge of
being introduced without pre-market safety testing.
Lack of definitive proof that a technology is harmful does not mean the technology is safe, yet the wireless industry has succeeded in selling this logical fallacy to the world. In truth, the safety of wireless technology has been an unsettled question since the industry’s earliest days. The upshot is that, over the past 30 years, billions of people around the world have been subjected to a massive public-health experiment: Use a cell phone today, find out later if it causes cancer or genetic damage. Meanwhile, the wireless industry has obstructed a full and fair understanding of the current science, aided by government agencies that have prioritized commercial interests over human health and news organizations that have failed to inform the public about what the scientific community really thinks. In other words, this public-health experiment has been conducted without the informed consent of its subjects, even as the industry keeps its thumb on the scale.
“The
absence of absolute proof does not mean the absence of risk,” Annie
Sasco, the former director of epidemiology for cancer prevention at
France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research, told
the attendees of the 2012 Childhood Cancer conference. “The younger
one starts using cell phones, the higher the risk,” Sasco
continued, urging a public-education effort to inform parents,
politicians, and the press about children’s exceptional
susceptibility.
For adults and children alike, the process by which wireless radiation may cause cancer remains uncertain, but it is thought to be indirect. Wireless radiation has been shown to damage the blood-brain barrier, a vital defense mechanism that shields the brain from carcinogenic chemicals elsewhere in the body (resulting, for example, from secondhand cigarette smoke). Wireless radiation has also been shown to interfere with DNA replication, a proven progenitor of cancer. In each of these cases, the risks are higher for children: Their skulls, being smaller, absorb more radiation than adults’ skulls do, while children’s longer life span increases their cumulative exposure.
For adults and children alike, the process by which wireless radiation may cause cancer remains uncertain, but it is thought to be indirect. Wireless radiation has been shown to damage the blood-brain barrier, a vital defense mechanism that shields the brain from carcinogenic chemicals elsewhere in the body (resulting, for example, from secondhand cigarette smoke). Wireless radiation has also been shown to interfere with DNA replication, a proven progenitor of cancer. In each of these cases, the risks are higher for children: Their skulls, being smaller, absorb more radiation than adults’ skulls do, while children’s longer life span increases their cumulative exposure.
The
wireless industry has sought to downplay concerns about cell phones’
safety, and the Federal Communications Commission has followed its
example. In 1996, the FCC established cell-phone safety levels based
on “specific absorption rate,” or SAR. Phones were required to
have a SAR of 1.6 watts or less per kilogram of body weight. In
2013, the
American Academy of Pediatrics advised the FCC that
its guidelines “do not account for the unique vulnerability and use
patterns specific to pregnant women and children.” Nevertheless,
the FCC has declined to update its standards.
The
FCC has granted the industry’s wishes so often that it qualifies as
a “captured agency,” argued journalist Norm Alster in a
report that
Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics published in
2015. The FCC allows cell-phone manufacturers to self-report SAR
levels, and does not independently test industry claims or require
manufacturers to display the SAR level on a phone’s packaging.
“Industry controls the FCC through a soup-to-nuts stranglehold that
extends from its well-placed campaign spending in Congress through
its control of the FCC’s congressional oversight committees to its
persistent agency lobbying,” Alster wrote. He also quoted the CTIA
website praising the FCC for “its light regulatory touch.”
The
revolving-door syndrome that characterizes so many industries and
federal agencies reinforces the close relationship between the
wireless industry and the FCC. Just as Tom Wheeler went from running
the CTIA (1992– 2004) to chairing the FCC (2013–2017), Meredith
Atwell Baker went from FCC commissioner (2009–2011) to the
presidency of the CTIA (2014 through today). To ensure its access on
Capitol Hill, the wireless industry made $26 million in campaign
contributions in 2016, according
to the Center for Responsive Politics,
and spent $87 million on lobbying in 2017.
Neutralizing
the safety issue has been an ongoing imperative because the research
keeps coming, much of it from outside the United States. But the
industry’s European and Asian branches have, like their US
counterpart, zealously war-gamed the science, spun the news coverage,
and thereby warped the public perception of their products’ safety.
The
WHO began to study the health effects of electric- and magnetic-field
radiation (EMF) in 1996 under the direction of Michael Repacholi, an
Australian biophysicist. Although
Repacholi
claimed on disclosure forms that he was “independent” of
corporate influence, in fact Motorola had funded his research: While
Repacholi was director of the WHO’s EMF program, Motorola paid
$50,000 a year to his former employer, the Royal Adelaide Hospital,
which then transferred the money to the WHO program. When journalists
exposed the payments, Repacholi denied that
there was anything untoward about them because Motorola had not paid
him personally. Eventually, Motorola’s payments were bundled with
other industry contributions and funneled through the Mobile and
Wireless Forum, a trade association that gave the WHO’s program
$150,000 annually. In 1999, Repacholi helped engineer a WHO statement
that “EMF exposures below the limits recommended in international
guidelines do not appear to have any known consequence on health.”
Two
wireless trade associations contributed $4.7 million to the
Interphone study launched
by the WHO’s International Agency for Cancer Research in 2000. That
$4.7 million represented 20 percent of the $24 million budget for the
Interphone study, which convened 21 scientists from 13 countries to
explore possible links between cell phones and two common types of
brain tumor: glioma and meningioma. The money was channeled through a
“firewall” mechanism intended to prevent corporate influence on
the IACR’s findings, but whether such firewalls work is debatable.
“Industry sponsors know [which scientists] receive funding;
sponsored scientists know who provides funding,” Dariusz
Leszczynski, an adjunct professor of biochemistry at the University
of Helsinki, has explained.
The
FCC grants the wireless industry’s wishes so often that it
qualifies as a “captured agency.”
To
be sure, the industry could not have been pleased with some of
the Interphone
study’s conclusions.
The study found that the heaviest cell-phone users were 80
percent more likely to develop glioma.
(The initial finding of 40 percent was increased to 80 to correct for
selection bias.) The Interphone study also concluded that individuals
who had owned a cell phone for 10 years or longer saw their risk of
glioma increase by nearly 120 percent.
However,
the study did not find any increased risk for individuals who used
their cell phones less frequently; nor was there evidence of any
connection with meningioma.
When
the Interphone conclusions were released in 2010, industry
spokespeople blunted their impact by deploying what experts on lying
call “creative truth-telling.” “Interphone’s conclusion of no
overall increased risk of brain cancer is consistent with conclusions
reached in an already large body of scientific research on this
subject,” John Walls, the vice president for public affairs at the
CTIA, told
reporters.
The wiggle word here is “overall”: Since some of the Interphone
studies did not find increased brain-cancer rates, stipulating
“overall” allowed Walls to ignore those that did. The misleading
spin confused enough news organizations that their coverage of the
Interphone study was essentially reassuring to the industry’s
customers. The
Wall Street Journal announced
“Cell Phone Study Sends Fuzzy Signal on Cancer Risk,” while the
BBC’s headline declared: “No Proof of Mobile Cancer Risk.”
The
industry’s $4.7 million contribution to the WHO appears to have had
its most telling effect in May 2011, when the WHO convened scientists
in Lyon, France, to discuss how to classify the cancer risk posed by
cell phones. The industry not only secured “observer” status at
Lyon for three of its trade associations; it placed two
industry-funded experts on the working group that would debate the
classification, as well as additional experts among the “invited
specialists” who advised the group.
Niels
Kuster, a Swiss engineer, initially filed a conflict-of-interest
statement affirming only that his research group had taken money from
“various governments, scientific institutions and corporations.”
But after Kuster co-authored a summary of the WHO’s findings in The
Lancet Oncology,
the medical journal issued
a correction expanding
on Kuster’s conflict-of-interest statement, noting payments from
the Mobile Manufacturers Forum, Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung,
Sony, GSMA, and Deutsche Telekom. Nevertheless, Kuster participated
in the entire 10 days of deliberations.
The
industry also mounted a campaign to discredit Lennart Hardell, a
Swedish professor of oncology serving on the working group. Hardell’s
studies,
which found an increase in gliomas and acoustic neuromas in long-term
cell-phone users, were some of the strongest evidence that the group
was considering.
Hardell
had already attracted the industry’s displeasure back in 2002, when
he began arguing that children shouldn’t use cell phones. Two
scientists with industry ties quickly published
a report with
the Swedish Radiation Authority dismissing Hardell’s research. His
detractors were John D. Boice and Joseph K. McLaughlin of the
International Epidemiology Institute, a company that provided
“Litigation Support” and “Corporate Counseling” to various
industries, according
to its website.
Indeed, at the very time Boice and McLaughlin were denigrating
Hardell’s work, the institute was providing expert-witness services
to Motorola in a brain-tumor lawsuit against the company.
The
wireless industry didn’t get the outcome that it wanted at Lyon,
but it did limit the damage. A number of the working group’s
scientists had favored increasing the classification of cell phones
to Category 2A, a “probable” carcinogen; but in
the end, the group could only agree on
an increase to 2B, a “possible” carcinogen.
That
result enabled the industry to continue proclaiming that there was no
scientifically established proof that cell phones are dangerous. Jack
Rowley of the GSMA trade association said that “interpretation
should be based on the overall balance of the evidence.” Once
again, the slippery word “overall” downplayed the significance of
scientific research that the industry didn’t like.
Industry-funded
scientists had been pressuring their colleagues for a decade by then,
according to Leszczynski, another member of the Lyon working group.
Leszczynski was an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School when
he first experienced such pressure, in 1999. He had wanted to
investigate the effects of radiation levels higher than the SAR
levels permitted by government, hypothesizing that this might better
conform to real-world practices. But when he proposed the idea at
scientific meetings, Leszczynski
said,
it was shouted down by Mays Swicord, Joe Elder, and C.K.
Chou—scientists who worked for Motorola. As Leszczynski recalled,
“It was a normal occurrence at scientific meetings—and I attended
really a lot of them—that whenever [a] scientist reported
biological effects at SAR over [government-approved levels], the
above-mentioned industry scientists, singularly or as a group, jumped
up to the microphone to condemn and to discredit the results.”
Years
later, a
study that
Leszczynski described as a “game changer” discovered that even
phones meeting government standards, which in Europe were a SAR of
2.0 watts per kilogram, could deliver exponentially higher peak
radiation levels to certain skin and blood cells. (SAR levels reached
a staggering 40 watts per kilogram—20 times higher than officially
permitted.) In other words, the official safety levels masked
dramatically higher exposures in hot spots, but industry-funded
scientists obstructed research on the health impacts.
“Everyone
knows that if your research results show that radiation has effects,
the funding flow dries up.” —Dariusz Leszczynski, adjunct
professor of biochemistry at the University of Helsinki
“Everyone
knows that if your research results show that radiation has effects,
the funding flow dries up,” Leszczynski said in an interview in
2011. Sure enough, the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority of
Finland, where Leszczynski had a long career, discontinued research
on the biological effects of cell phones and discharged him a year
later.
According
to scientists involved in the process, the WHO may decide later this
year to reconsider its categorization of the cancer risk posed by
cell phones; the WHO itself told The
Nation that
before making any such decision, it will review the final report of
the National Toxicology Program, a US government initiative.
The results
reported by the NTP in
2016 seem to strengthen the case for increasing the assessment of
cell-phone radiation to a “probable” or even a “known”
carcinogen. Whereas the WHO’s Interphone study compared the
cell-phone usage of people who had contracted cancer with that of
people who hadn’t, the NTP study exposed rats and mice to
cell-phone radiation and observed whether the animals got sick.
“There
is a carcinogenic effect,” announced Ron Melnick, the designer of
the study. Male rats exposed to cell-phone radiation developed cancer
at a substantially higher rate, though the same effect was not seen
in female rats. Rats exposed to radiation also had lower birth rates,
higher infant mortality, and more heart problems than those in the
control group. The cancer effect occurred in only a small percentage
of the rats, but that small percentage could translate into a massive
amount of human cancers. “Given the extremely large number of
people who use wireless communications devices, even a very small
increase in the incidence of disease…could have broad implications
for public health,” the NTP’s draft report explained.
But
this was not the message that media coverage of the NTP study
conveyed, as the industry blanketed reporters with its usual “more
research is needed” spin. “Seriously,
stop with the irresponsible reporting on cell phones and cancer,”
demanded a Vox headline.
“Don’t
Believe the Hype,”
urged The
Washington Post. Newsweek,
for its part, stated
the NTP’s findings in a single paragraph,
then devoted the rest of the article to an argument for why they
should be ignored.
The
NTP study was to be peer-reviewed at a meeting on March 26–28, amid
signs that the program’s leadership is pivoting to downplay its
findings. The NTP had issued a public-health warning when the study’s
early results were released in 2016. But when the NTP released
essentially the same data in February 2018, John Bucher, the senior
scientist who directed the study, announced in a telephone press
conference that “I don’t think this is a high-risk situation at
all,” partly because the study had exposed the rats and mice to
higher levels of radiation than a typical cell-phone user
experienced.
Microwave
News’s
Slesin speculated
on potential explanations for
the NTP’s apparent backtracking: new leadership within the program,
where a former drug-company executive, Brian Berridge, now runs the
day-to-day operations; pressure from business-friendly Republicans on
Capitol Hill and from the US military, whose weapons systems rely on
wireless radiation; and the anti-science ideology of the Trump White
House. The question now: Will the scientists doing the peer review
endorse the NTP’s newly ambivalent perspective, or challenge it?
The
scientific evidence that cell phones and wireless technologies in
general can cause cancer and genetic damage is not definitive, but it
is abundant and has been increasing over time. Contrary to the
impression that most news coverage has given the public, 90 percent
of the 200 existing studies included in the National Institutes of
Health’s PubMed database on the oxidative effects of wireless
radiation—its tendency to cause cells to shed electrons, which can
lead to cancer and other diseases—have found a significant impact,
according to a survey of the scientific literature conducted by Henry
Lai. Seventy-two percent of neurological studies and 64 percent of
DNA studies have also found effects.
The
wireless industry’s determination to bring about the Internet of
Things, despite the massive increase in radiation exposure this would
unleash, raises the stakes exponentially. Because 5G radiation can
only travel short distances, antennas roughly the size of a pizza box
will have to be installed approximately every 250 feet to ensure
connectivity. “Industry is going to need hundreds of thousands,
maybe millions, of new antenna sites in the United States alone,”
said Moskowitz, the UC Berkeley researcher. “So people will be
bathed in a smog of radiation 24/7.”
There
is an alternative approach, rooted in what some scientists and
ethicists call the “precautionary principle,” which holds that
society doesn’t need absolute proof of hazard to place limits on a
given technology. If the evidence is sufficiently solid and the risks
sufficiently great, the precautionary principle calls for delaying
the deployment of that technology until further research clarifies
its impacts. The scientists’
petition discussed
earlier urges government regulators to apply the precautionary
principle to 5G technology. Current safety guidelines “protect
industry—not health,” contends the petition, which “recommend[s]
a moratorium on the roll-out of [5G]…until potential hazards for
human health and the environment have been fully investigated by
scientists independent from industry.”
No scientist can say with certainty how many wireless-technology users are likely to contract cancer, but that is precisely the point: We simply don’t know. Nevertheless, we are proceeding as if we do know the risk, and that the risk is vanishingly small. Meanwhile, more and more people around the world, including countless children and adolescents, are getting addicted to cell phones every day, and the shift to radiation-heavy 5G technology is regarded as a fait accompli. Which is just how Big Wireless likes it.
Mark
HertsgaardTWITTERMark
Hertsgaard, The
Nation’s
environment correspondent and investigative editor, is the author of
seven books, including HOT:
Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth .
Mark
DowieMark
Dowie, an investigative historian based outside Willow Point,
California, is the author of the new book The
Haida Gwaii Lesson: A Strategic Playbook for Indigenous Sovereignty.
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===============================Ach, de normale gang van zaken: geld verdienen gaat in de inhumane neoliberale maatschappij ver voor op de volksgezondheid............ (al moet gezegd worden dat deze gang van zaken zo oud is als de weg naar Rome....)
