“Scientists Urge Upgrading RFR Emission Risks” 

Published by permission of TR Daily

Two scientific papers released today suggest that the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) upgrade the stated carcinogenic risk of radio frequency radiation (RFR) to humans in the wake of studies released since 2011.

In 2011, an IARC working group concluded that RFR emissions from mobile phones are “possibly carcinogenic to humans” (TR Daily, May 31, 2011). But the working group stressed the need for additional research.

Since then, there have been a number of studies released, including the results of $25 million cellphone radiation research done by the National Toxicology Program (NTP), an interagency program housed at the National Institute of Health. A draft report issued by the NTP found significant tumors in tissues surrounding nerves in the hearts of male rats exposed to RFR (TR Daily, Feb. 2). An expert panel that reviewed the NTP research recommended that the government upgrade some of its findings (TR Daily, March 28).

Meanwhile, researchers who performed the world’s largest animal study on the impact of RFR said in March that they had found a link between the radiation and cancer in rats (TR Daily, March 22). The researchers stressed that the study conducted by the Ramazzini Institute (RI) in Italy found the same type of tumors, malignant schwannomas, that were found in the NTP study.

The two papers released today are published in the journal “Environmental Research.”

“The Epidemiological studies reported since the 2011 IARC Working Group meeting are adequate to consider RFR as a probable human carcinogen (Group 2A). However, they must be supplemented with the recently reported animal data as performed at the Ramazzini Institute and the US National Toxicology Program as well as by mechanistic studies. These experimental findings together with the epidemiology reviewed here are sufficient in our opinion, to upgrade the IARC categorization of RFR to Group 1, carcinogenic to humans,” said one paper. “It would be useful to know more about the association of additional tumor types such as parotid gland, testicular, breast, hematopoietic malignancies and multiple primaries with RFR. Case studies should continue to be conducted in the absence of a better exposure assessment system to increase awareness and understand the relationship between exposure to RFR and disease causation, as well as trial-error experiments and interventions.”

The paper cites, among other things, nine studies between 2011 and 2017 reporting an increased risk of brain cancer from cellphone use and four case-control studies in 2013 and 2014 reporting increased risk of hearing nerve tumors.

The paper was written by Anthony Miller, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health; L. Lloyd Morgan, a senior research fellow at the Environmental Health Trust; Iris Udasin, a professor and medical director at the EOHSI Clinical Center at the Rutgers University School of Public Health; and Devra Lee Davis, a visiting professor of medicine at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and president of the Environmental Health Trust.

The other paper was written by Ron Melnick, a former senior toxicologist for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences who led the design of the NTP RFR research.

“In conclusion, animal studies and mechanistic studies on RFR that have been published since 2011 clearly show that the evidence on the carcinogenicity of RFR is much stronger than it was at the time of the IARC evaluation. If the recent animal and mechanistic findings had been available in 2011, it is likely that RFR would have been classified as a probable human carcinogen,” Mr. Melnick said.

In response to the papers released today, a CTIA spokesperson said, “The safety of consumers is important to the wireless industry. We follow the guidance of the experts when it comes to cellphones and health effects. Numerous scientific studies have been conducted over several decades and we expect more in the future. Based on those decades of research, the Federal Communications Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the World Health Organization, the American Cancer Society and numerous other international and U.S. organizations and health experts continue to say that the scientific evidence shows no known health risk to humans due to the RF energy emitted by cellphones. The evidence includes analysis of official federal brain tumor statistics showing that since the introduction of cellphones in the mid-1980s, the rate of brain tumors in the United States has remained stable.” —Paul Kirby, paul.kirby@wolterskluwer.com

Posted with permission from TR Daily