Claim: WHO Reviews Downplay Cellphone Radiation Risk
The International Commission on the Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields ICBE-EMF is a “consortium of scientists, doctors and related professionals” who study wireless radiation and recommend wireless radiation exposure guidelines “based on the best peer-reviewed scientific research publications.”
“The WHO-commissioned systematic reviews are simply inadequate to conclude that wireless radiation is safe,” ICBE-EMF Chairperson John Frank, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh and professor emeritus of public health at the University of Toronto, said in a press release.
It would “mislead the public” to present the WHO’s reviews as evidence that current wireless radiation exposure guidelines are safe, he said.
Most of the WHO reviews had “significant flaws” — including methodological problems and bias concerns — that undermined their conclusions about the safety of radiofrequency (RF) radiation, ICBE-EMF said.
The group said that, despite the flaws, one of the WHO reviews showed RF radiation exposure reduced men’s fertility, while another linked cellphone radiation exposure to two types of cancer in animals.
ICBE-EMF published a supplemental document alongside its report detailing examples of the WHO review authors’ ties to the wireless industry. It called for a “thorough and more independent review” of the evidence.
“Until that’s done, we strongly urge the public and regulatory authorities internationally to consider the current WHO-recommended safe exposure limits to be potentially too high to fully protect the public and the environment,” Frank said during a press conference.
The group also urged regulatory authorities to do “everything possible” to reduce public RF radiation exposure, especially for pregnant women, children and people with disabilities, Frank said.
WHO preparing to issue ‘monograph’ used to set regulations and safety limits
The ICBE-EMF published its report on Oct. 2 in Environmental Health in response to 12 WHO-backed systematic reviews on the possible health effects of RF radiation.
A systematic review “attempts to collect and analyze all evidence that answers a specific question,” according to the CDC.
The WHO is releasing the reviews in preparation for a WHO Environmental Health Criteria Monograph about RF’s possible health risks. Governments will likely use the monograph for setting safety and regulatory standards.
Ron Melnick, Ph.D., ICBE-EMF senior adviser, said ICBE-EMF investigated the WHO reviews “because of our longstanding involvement in this research and the potential influence these reviews could have on future policy decisions.”
Melnick is the former senior toxicologist at the National Toxicology Program and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
ICBE-EMF reported that the WHO reviews’ authors excluded relevant studies, relied on weak ones and improperly combined studies with widely differing exposure conditions. These methodological flaws skewed the reviews’ conclusions.
For instance, most authors tried to mathematically summarize the findings of very different studies into one review.
Lumping together different studies into one review can hide important differences, Joel Moskowitz, Ph.D., director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California, Berkeley, said at the press conference.
“Despite these problems, the authors of the WHO reviews relied on these flawed results to draw confident conclusions generally of no [negative health] effect,” he said.
Moskowitz said leading experts — including those at the Cochrane Collaboration, “a globally respected organization for health research” — warn against mathematically summarizing study findings when the studies are too few or too different. Instead, researchers are encouraged to describe the studies in words, not numbers.
Only one of the 12 WHO-backed reviews followed that advice, Moskowitz said.
That systematic review concluded there is “high certainty” evidence that cellphone radiation exposure causes two types of cancer in animals — including malignant gliomas in the brain and malignant schwannomas, or nerve tumors, in the heart.
The review noted that studies on humans had previously found both tumor types.
Moskowitz said the WHO should recommission the reviews and require the authors to describe the studies with words, not numbers, to avoid inaccurately characterizing the studies’ findings.
In addition to their report, ICBE-EMF published a supplemental document explaining how most of the reviews yielded unreliable results.
Science-based RF radiation safety guidelines ‘urgently needed’
An investigation by The Defender found that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) bases its RF radiation safety standard for humans largely on a few small-sample studies conducted in the 1970s and 1980s.
The FCC based its standard — which hasn’t been updated since 1996 — on the assumption that RF radiation can cause harm only at levels high enough to heat body tissue.
In 2022, the ICBE-EMF published a peer-reviewed paper refuting this assumption, called the “thermal-only paradigm.” It said in its Oct. 2 report that “revised science-based guidelines that are protective of human health and the environment are urgently needed.”
The FCC has not yet complied with a court-ordered mandate to explain how it determined that its current guidelines adequately protect humans and the environment from the harmful effects of RF radiation exposure.
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