Perhaps right about now you are thinking to yourself, If EMFs are so bad, why isn’t anybody doing something about it? Moreover, Why are we only continuing to adopt more and more devices that have the potential to harm our health?
I am so glad you asked because I find the truth to be quite a sickening tale. You might too when you learn how these companies have valued their profit over your health, and your family’s health.
The story of how EMFs became such an integral part of our environment—despite mounting evidence that they harm human and environmental health—shares many parallels with the history of tobacco use.
Many tend to forget that the tobacco industry, like the wireless industry today, adopted a policy of denial and silence to the overwhelming science documenting the biologic damage and health hazards caused by cigarettes. It effectively stuck to this tactic for decades.
I believe that when you see the parallels between the tobacco and the wireless industries, you’ll be motivated to reconsider how much you use cell phones and other wireless devices.
If you want to review all the sordid strategies the tobacco industry successfully and brilliantly deployed that prematurely killed millions of people, I encourage you to read Harvard University professor Allan M. Brandt’s comprehensive review, Inventing Conflicts of Interest: A History of Tobacco Industry Tactics1 and former assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health David Michaels’ book Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health.
As early as the 1950s, there was a powerful consolidation of scientific evidence showing smoking led to serious respiratory and cardiac diseases. Yet it took 50 years before health concerns about smoking became pervasive enough for smoking rates to drop significantly.
How did we stay in the dark for so long?
The tobacco companies’ guiding light through it all was the public relations firm they hired in the 1950s, Hill+Knowlton Strategies. Rather than play the losing game of simply denying facts, Hill+Knowlton proposed brilliant strategies the wireless industry would later co-opt.
It is revealing to review the bullet points below from a leaked document outlining the objectives of tobacco company Brown & Williamson at the time:
Martin Blank, Ph.D., a leading expert on the health dangers of EMFs, suggests in his book Overpowered rereading these objectives while replacing cigarette with cell phone and smoking with using cell phones. The result is quite clarifying, and quite chilling.
By paying scientists directly to perform studies, the industry could hand-select researchers who were already biased toward believing that cigarettes were safe. By doing so, tobacco companies also created conflicts of interest, as even impartial researchers can be influenced by a desire to keep their funders happy.
As an example, a 1997 review by researchers at Washington College in Maryland looked at 91 studies that investigated a possible link between tobacco and cognitive performance. They analyzed the results of each study as well as the source of funding, and they saw a clear difference in findings of studies that received funds from the tobacco industry versus those that did not.
The study authors wrote, “Our analysis shows that researchers acknowledging tobacco industry support were considerably more likely to arrive at a conclusion favorable to the tobacco industry, versus those researchers not acknowledging industry support.”3
By pumping out more studies, the tobacco companies could claim that the science regarding the health effects of tobacco use was inconclusive, all the while pretending to be committed to public well-being.4
Even a 1964 report by the U.S. Surgeon General that reviewed 7,000 articles relating to smoking and disease and concluded that cigarette smoking was a cause of lung cancer and laryngeal cancer in men and a probable cause of lung cancer in women didn’t result in new government regulations or a decrease in public demand. That report cued the tobacco industry to fund even more studies.
A wide-ranging and long-lasting secondary effect of this approach was to introduce a culture of skepticism of science itself. Ultimately, by making science fair game in the battle of public relations, the tobacco industry set a destructive precedent that would affect future debates on subjects such as food, global warming, pharmaceuticals,5 and, yes, EMFs.
Hill+Knowlton guided its tobacco clients to form a separate entity to lobby for legislation and regulatory rules that were friendly to their industry. The Tobacco Institute was formed in 1958 and quickly became one of the most powerful and well-funded lobbying organizations in Washington, D.C.
It empowered tobacco companies to buy favorable treatment by the government while evading the perception that they were doing so. After all, it was a separate entity. The Tobacco Institute went on to operate for more than 40 years.
Although the tobacco industry managed to escape liability and major regulation for more than four decades, eventually its stranglehold on the American public came to an end. In March 1997, nearly 30 years after smoking was strongly linked to the dramatic rise of lung cancer, Liggett Group, the smallest of the country’s five leading cigarette makers, finally admitted that smoking causes cancer.6,7 The other tobacco companies soon followed suit.
The admissions of harm were instrumental in swaying public opinion. For example, the first government-mandated warnings on cigarette packages appeared in 1965 when approximately 45 percent of Americans smoked, and that percentage did not decline significantly until 1977, when it reached 36 percent. It wasn’t until 1989 that the number dropped below 30 percent. In 2018, the number fell to its lowest ever—16 percent.8
What makes all this history acutely tragic is all the lives that were lost. Even the conservative Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated in November 2018 that nearly half a million people in the U.S. continue to die every year from cigarette smoking, despite the fact that the percentage of smokers had decreased by more than 50 percent from previous years.9
Therefore, the 50 years of tobacco industry denial easily resulted in tens of millions of needless deaths and suffering in the U.S. and many hundreds of millions worldwide.
This deeply saddens me, as my own mother was one of its victims. She smoked from a young age, and although she quit in her late 70s, the damage was done. She developed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), required regular oxygen therapy with daily breathing treatments, and eventually died prematurely from complications.
It seems that the wireless industry has carefully studied the strategies the tobacco companies used to deny the health risks associated with their products for more than 50 years. In fact, in the past two decades, many big players in the wireless industry have hired Hill+Knowlton, including Motorola and Virgin Mobile as well as a wide variety of other tech companies engaged in the wireless industry.
In that time, telecommunications companies have regularly funded studies to assess the health risks of their mobile devices, just as the tobacco companies did before them. Ostensibly, this appears to be an approach designed to help protect consumers. Yet we know that when a company funds research into its own products, it creates a powerful conflict of interest that distorts findings in favor of whomever financed the study.10–12
A major push to produce supportive research began in 1994 by the wireless industry trade group CTIA, which, at that time, was headed by Tom Wheeler (remember his name, as he went on to become chairman of the FCC in 2013).
This effort came about after David Reynard, a widower, filed a lawsuit against wireless phone manufacturer NEC Corporation of America. In late 1993, Reynard appeared on Larry King Live, where he shared how his wife regularly used an NEC wireless phone before developing the brain tumor that killed her.
In Reynard’s mind, the connection between his wife’s cell phone use and her cancer was clear, and he called for greater safety measures. His story went viral, and shares of telecom stocks plunged in the aftermath.
In order to produce a counter-narrative, the CTIA handpicked Dr. George Carlo, a scientist who was known for his industry-friendly scientific findings, to be the founding director of the Wireless Technology Research project (WTR), an industry-funded research group.
Before heading the WTR, Carlo had conducted research into the safety of breast implants as well as low levels of dioxin exposure. In both instances, Carlo’s research was funded by the industries involved. And in both cases, Carlo found only minimal or no health risks.
He likely seemed to the CTIA to be the perfect person to further the wireless industry’s efforts to at least muddy the scientific waters, if not refute any evidence of harm altogether—though that’s not what came to pass, as Carlo would eventually warn wireless industry executives of the health risks of their products.
Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, the industry gave Carlo $27 million in funds to pay for research evaluating the health risks of EMFs, and hundreds of conflicted studies were produced during that time.
Ironically, over the course of this initiative, Carlo became disillusioned. In 2007, he admitted in a paper that “the industry strategy has been to fund low-risk studies that assure a positive result—then use them to convince the media and public that cell phones have been proven to be safe, even though the actual science proved nothing of the sort.”13
Other researchers were coming to similar conclusions around the same time, including Henry Lai, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington who had conducted research of his own that found that exposure to radiation similar to that emitted by cell phones could cause DNA damage.
In 2006, Lai examined 326 studies on the safety of cell phone radiation conducted between 1990 and 2006 and discovered that 44 percent of them did not find harmful effects, while 56 percent did.
Here is where it gets interesting. When he categorized the studies by funding, the numbers told an entirely different story: 67 percent of the independently funded studies found a harmful effect, while only 28 percent of the industry-funded studies did.14 This groundbreaking insight led others to investigate the link between funding and results.
In 2008, a team of Swiss researchers led by Dr. Anke Huss conducted a review of 59 studies evaluating the biological effects of exposure to wireless radiation. They found that 82 percent of the studies funded by governments and other independent agencies showed harmful effects, compared to only 33 percent of studies funded by industry.15
A 2009 review of 55 studies that compared human brain activity in the presence and absence of wireless radiation fields found that 37 of those studies concluded that there was an EMF-related effect on brain function, while 18 observed no effect.
What was conclusive was that industry funded a full 87 percent of the studies included, suggesting that the industry was seeking to increase the number of studies so it could claim there was no consensus in the scientific community.16
It is not just the conflicting findings that can be problematic in industry-funded studies; it is also often the very design of the studies themselves. There are many variables in any scientific study—it is imperative that researchers construct their experiments in a way that doesn’t inadvertently skew their results, which is not ordinarily the case in industry-funded research.
In a 2010 review of 23 studies designed to determine a connection between the use of cell phones and the risk of developing tumors, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed not only the results of the studies, but also the initial design of the studies, and then compared that to the source of funding.
Their conclusion was that “among the 10 higher quality studies, we found a harmful association between phone use and tumor risk. The lower quality studies, which failed to meet scientific best practices, were primarily industry funded.”17
One way industry-funded studies of EMFs are problematic from the outset is that they use simulated EMF exposures instead of real cell phones. They do this under the justification of seeking to control variables, but the reality is that a simulated cell phone is far safer than a real cell phone.
Real EMF signals vary unpredictably from moment to moment, especially in their intensity. Simulated EMF signals have fixed parameters, and thus are invariable and completely predictable.18
There is a dramatic difference between the results of studies using real exposures from commercially available devices and studies employing simulated exposures from test phones. While about half of the studies using simulated exposures with test phones do not find any effects, nearly all studies using real-life exposures from commercially available devices demonstrate adverse effects.19–37
Once the wireless industry funds these studies it “counts up the studies and presents the issue to the public as a simple scoreboard,” as Martin Blank, Ph.D., wrote in his book Overpowered.
If there are 100 studies done on the safety of cell phones and 50 of them (in most cases, those funded by the industry) find no harmful effects and 50 of them do, then the wireless companies can claim that “the science is mixed,” when in reality the science that is not funded by the industry is actually quite clear.
The main vehicle for spreading these safety claims is the CTIA, which creates websites such as wirelesshealthfacts.com that contain statements such as “The scientific consensus, based on peer-reviewed evidence in the U.S. and a number of other countries, indicates that wireless devices do not pose a public health risk for adults or children.”38
CTIA then feeds its position to the media. Here is a quote from a 2018 article in Consumer Reports, a periodical purported to protect the public. It is a classic illustration of how mainstream media often addresses the question of whether or not cell phone radiation is harmful:
When it comes to cell phones, scientists have looked at findings from animal research and cells in test tubes exposed to RF radiation in a lab, as well as observational studies in humans. These human studies have tried to see whether heavy users of cell phones have higher rates of brain cancers and other health problems compared with people who use cell phones less often.
All that research . . . has been mixed, with no definitive proof that cell-phone radiation harms human health, but also unable to completely clear it of any potential risk.”39
Clear bias also shows up in coverage of major studies that find links between cell phone radiation and health. Let’s look at an example: The National Toxicology Program’s $30 million, multiyear study that evaluated the effect of exposure to radio frequencies, similar to those used in 2G and 3G cell phones, on rats.
In the study, researchers exposed rats to varying levels of wireless radiation for nine hours a day, seven days a week, for their entire life span. A control group of rats received no exposure to wireless radiation throughout their life span.
Final results, which were released in 2018, found “clear evidence” of malignant tumors, known as schwannomas, in the hearts of male rats and “some evidence” of malignant tumors, known as gliomas, in the brains of male rats. Interestingly, the cancer rates in the female rats were far lower.40
According to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, approximately 150 reporters attended a press conference held via telephone to announce the study’s preliminary findings in May 2016 and, as a result, the media wrote more than 1,000 news stories about the findings.41
Of these stories, there was a wide variance in how the media reported the findings of the study, as evidenced by coverage in The New York Times versus The Wall Street Journal.
The Times piece ran with the headline “Study of Cellphone Risks Finds ‘Some Evidence’ of Link to Cancer, at Least in Male Rats,” with the subhead, “Many caveats apply, and the results involve radio frequencies long out of routine use.”42
The Journal ran a story with the headline “Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study,” with the subhead, “Multiyear, peer-reviewed study found ‘low incidences’ of two types of tumors in male rats exposed to type of radio frequencies commonly emitted by cellphones.”43
With such disparity in reporting on the same study, it’s easy to see how the public remains largely unconvinced of the dangers of wireless radiation.
Just as the tobacco industry had the Tobacco Institute, the entity that lobbied lawmakers on behalf of cigarette manufacturers, the telecommunications industry has the CTIA and National Cable & Telecommunications Association (now called NCTA: The Internet & Television Association) to do its bidding.
Temptation is everywhere in Washington, where moneyed lobbyists and industry representatives throw the best parties and dinners. The industry’s deep pockets enables it to exert its influence over lawmakers already in office, candidates running for office, and government employees and appointees who work at and run the agencies overseeing telecommunications.
It was lobbying that played a major role in the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which included a huge concession to the wireless industry that effectively silenced the public’s say in where and how wireless infrastructure is built out. Section 322(c) (7) (B) (iv) reads, in part:
No State or local government or instrumentality thereof may regulate the placement, construction, and modification of personal wireless service facilities on the basis of the environmental effects of radio frequency emissions to the extent that such facilities comply with the Commission’s regulations concerning such emissions.44
As a result, the industry was essentially given the blessing of the government to install cell towers basically wherever they like: school roofs and playgrounds, church spires, water towers, and trees all became fair game for hosting cell towers.
More than 300,000 such sites have been built since the act passed.45 The public was left with little to no recourse to influence these decisions because of health concerns.
It was a huge victory for the telecom industry that came as a direct result of a massive lobbying push, reportedly with a price tag of approximately $50 million.46 Larry Pressler, then a Republican senator from South Dakota, described it as the most lobbied bill in history.
Lobbyists lavishly rewarded congressional staffers who helped them write this new law, as 13 of 15 staffers later became lobbyists themselves.47
Since their founding, the NCTA and CTIA have been among Washington’s top lobbying spenders annually. Take 2018, for example, when AT&T spent $18.5 million, Verizon spent $12 million, NCTA spent $13.2 million, and CTIA spent $9.5 million.48 Consider this is in only one year. Overall, the communications/electronics sector is one of Washington’s super heavyweight lobbyists.
While these numbers are large indeed, they are still getting bigger. In a 2019 interview, researcher Joel Moskowitz, Ph.D., who is on the faculty of the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, stated that the wireless industry is now investing $100 million dollars a year in its lobbying efforts.49
Another tactic the wireless industry has used to sow seeds of doubt with the public is to handpick scientists it believes will be a source of supportive studies, and then discredit those same scientists if their findings suggest that the cell phones you rely on for so many things are found to be contributing factors to illness.
Let us start by looking at what happened to Dr. Henry Lai, whose research into the number of studies on the effects of wireless radiation I discussed earlier in this chapter.
In the early 1990s, Lai and fellow University of Washington researcher Narendra “N.P.” Singh submitted a request for funding from the Wireless Technology Research project (WTR) to conduct research on the effects of exposure to low-intensity microwave radiation on the brain cells of rats.
As Lai and Singh recounted in a letter published in Microwave News, “WTR made two site visits to our laboratory, in June and July of 1994. During one visit, [George] Carlo said that he was interested in our data and would send a check to us the following week so that we could continue our research. The check never came.” They secured funding from the National Institutes of Health instead. What they found was damning indeed.
Their results, published in the journal Bioelectromagnetics, found single-strand DNA damage in the brains of rats who were exposed to a mere two hours of both pulsed and continuous low-intensity microwave radiation of 2.5 GHz, a similar frequency to the one that is emitted by your 4G cell phone.50
Motorola, when it learned of Lai and Singh’s findings, went into defensive mode. An internal company memo, dated December 13, 1994, discussed the best strategy to cast doubt on the study’s conclusions. In it, executives suggested the following language:
While this work raises some interesting questions about possible biological effects, it is our understanding that there are too many uncertainties—related to the methodology employed, the findings that have been reported and the science that underlies them—to draw any conclusions about its significance at this time.
Without additional work in this field, there is absolutely no basis to determine whether [what] the researchers found . . . [had] anything at all to do with DNA damage or health risks, especially at the frequencies and power levels or wireless communication devices.51
It’s not only industry that has sought to stifle research into the biological effects of EMFs—the military has done it too. One of the premier researchers in this area, Dr. Allan Frey, began researching how microwave frequencies affect the body in 1960. At the time, Frey was 25, a young neuroscientist working at General Electric’s Advanced Electronics Center at Cornell University.
From these early days, Frey was interested in how electrical fields affect brain function. So when he received a call from a radar technician who made the incredible claim that he could “hear” radar, Frey eagerly went to the site to evaluate why this radar might be audible. Sure enough, he could hear it too—a low-level, persistent humming. “I could hear the radar going ‘zip, zip, zip,’” he later reported.
Intrigued, Frey began an investigation that ultimately led him to realize that the ear did not record the radar sounds, the brain did. This is now called the “Frey effect” and caused quite a stir in the scientific community.
On the heels of this discovery, Frey began receiving funding from the Office of Naval Research and the U.S. Army, who were seeking to increase their use of radar in populated areas and wanted to evaluate its effects on public health.
For 15 years, Frey enjoyed the support he received from the military to test the potential effects of EMFs on the body. What he found was remarkable. He showed that rats became docile when exposed to radiation levels of 50 microwatts per square centimeter. Then he showed that he could change rat behavior at exposures to 6 microwatts per square centimeter.
Next, he stopped a frog heart—stopped it dead—at 0.6 microwatts per square centimeter. This is particularly remarkable when you consider that 0.6 microwatts per square centimeter is 10,000 times less than your cell phone emits when you have it pressed to your ear on a call.
Frey ran into trouble with his source of funding in 1975, when he published a landmark paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences that revealed how EMF exposure caused “leakage” of the blood-brain barrier.52 During this particular study, Frey injected a fluorescent dye into the circulatory system of rats, then ran microwave frequencies over their bodies. After that exposure, the dye showed up in the rats’ brains.
The blood-brain barrier is an extremely important means of protection for your brain; it prevents viruses, toxins, and microbes that may be in your bloodstream from penetrating the sanctity of your brain.
Frey later reported that the military instructed him to stop talking about his research or risk losing his funding.53 Pentagon-funded scientists also claimed to have tried to replicate his results without success. This essentially shut down further research on the effects of EMFs on the blood-brain barrier for decades, at least in the U.S.
Frey certainly was not the first researcher to conflict with the military.
In the late 1950s, ophthalmologist Milton Zaret became one of the first scientists to warn of the potential for harm from exposure to nonionizing radiation. Zaret found a link between microwave radiation and the development of cataracts.
At the time, the primary exposure to microwave frequencies came through the military’s use of radar. Microwave ovens were still in their infancy. Cell phones were decades off. As a result, most of Zaret’s funding came from the military, including the Air Force, Army, and Navy.
Throughout the 1960s, Zaret published findings that established harmful effects at levels of exposure to EMFs well below current safety standards. In 1973, Zaret was the first medical doctor to testify in Congress about the dangers of microwave radiation. During his testimony, Zaret sounded the alarm.
There is a clear, present, and ever-increasing danger to the entire population of our country from exposure to the entire nonionizing portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The dangers cannot be overstated because more nonionizing radiation injuries occur covertly, usually do not become manifest until after latent periods of years, and when they do become manifest, the effects are seldom recognized.54
Gradually, Zaret lost every one of his military contracts because of his findings. He was also the brunt of a campaign to discredit him.
There were some who gave Zaret the credit and credence he deserved. Paul Brodeur, an investigative science journalist who covered the health hazards of EMFs for The New Yorker and wrote the 1977 book The Zapping of America: Microwaves, Their Deadly Risk, and the Coverup, rightfully refers to Zaret as an “early prophet.”
There is one way that the wireless industry has surpassed Big Tobacco—and that is by using its money and influence to get insiders appointed to government agencies charged with regulating its products, namely the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Most people believe that our federal regulatory agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the FCC, are staffed with impartial experts who take a leading role in performing research and establishing safety standards with an eye toward protecting public health.
This is very often not the case. Typically, government agencies rely on the research community to produce findings that they then merely evaluate to determine regulatory action. And guess who is funding much of the research that determines product safety regulations? That’s right, the industries who manufacture the products.
The FCC in particular is frequently referred to as a “captured agency” thanks to Norm Alster of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, who in 2015 wrote a short book titled Captured Agency: How the Federal Communications Commission Is Dominated by the Industries It Presumably Regulates.55
As a captured agency, the FCC is a prime example of institutional corruption. Corruption not in the sense that the higher-ups receive envelopes bulging with cash, but the regulatory system favors powerful private influences so much that even the most well-intentioned efforts to protect the public and the environment are often overwhelmed, typically at the expense of public interest.
A detailed look at FCC actions (and nonactions) shows that over the years the agency has granted the wireless industry virtually everything it has ever requested.
The wireless industry controls the FCC through a soup-to-nuts stranglehold on Congress that includes well-placed campaign donations to members of Congress; power over the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, which oversees the FCC; and persistent lobbying.
According to a 2019 article that appeared in The Guardian, the 51 U.S. Senators and their spouses are often heavily invested in public companies they are charged with regulating. And the Wireless Telecomm Group is the company with the single highest amount of stock owned by Republican U.S. Senators, to the tune of $3 million. Apple is the second highest, with Republicans owning stock worth nearly $1.5 million and Democratic Senators just shy of $1 million worth. As the article says:
It’s not illegal for members of Congress to have personal financial stakes in the industries on which they legislate. But such investments raise questions about lawmakers’ motivations. If a representative on the House financial services committee owns hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stock in Bank of America, how might this investment affect their questioning of Bank of America’s CEO in a hearing? Could it influence how they legislate and vote on banking issues?56
The wireless industry has spun a web that embraces Congress, congressional oversight committees, and Washington social life. The network ties the public sector to the private through a frictionless revolving door, really no door at all.
Recent FCC chairmen, including Tom Wheeler (who held the office from 2013 to 2017) and Ajit Pai (who assumed the role in 2017), have worked directly for the industry they were then tasked with overseeing. Pai was once a general counsel for Verizon; Wheeler was the CEO of the CTIA and president of the NCTA.
A natural consequence of all the efforts to sow confusion about the true risks of wireless radiation and to infiltrate regulatory agencies is that the government as well as nongovernment organizations charged with safekeeping public health falter.
They seesaw on whether or not there are health hazards in the first place, and then on how serious those hazards are. A perfect example of this has been the long and winding road for EMFs to be classified as a potential, possible, or probable carcinogen.
In 1989, the EPA assigned a team in its Office of Health and Environmental Assessment (OHEA) the task of carefully examining the known biological effects of exposure to microwave radiation.
While the team’s work continued for several years, in March 1990 the OHEA issued a draft of its initial findings suggesting that the EPA designate all EMFs “probable human carcinogens.” The New York Times reported on the draft and drew a fair amount of public attention.57 It seemed like the tide of both public opinion and governmental oversight might turn toward caution.
Alas, the moment did not last long. The OHEA draft inspired the White House to order its Committee on Interagency Radiation Research and Policy Coordination (CIRRPC) to create its own report. The CIRRPC report stated that there was “no convincing evidence in the published literature” to link extremely low frequency EMFs to any “demonstrable health hazards.”58
Following the lead of the executive branch of the government, the OHEA team issued another draft of its report later in 1990 in which it walked back its earlier recommendation, stating that it would be “inappropriate” to compare EMFs with chemical carcinogens.
Even though the OHEA draft report did not result in an official EPA designation of EMFs as any kind of carcinogen, it did contribute to other branches of government taking action to investigate the health risks. In 1992, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, part of which funded a five-year research initiative to investigate the potential health risks of EMFs.
A working group of nearly 30 scientists appointed by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) carried out this research. In 1998, NIEHS produced a 532-page report in which the experts voted 19 to 9 in favor of designating EMFs a “possible carcinogen.”59
Again, there was backlash to the report, and it triggered another important investment into further research. In 2000, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a division of the World Health Organization (WHO), began a 10-year, $30 million, 13-country Interphone Study that looked specifically at the effects of the radiation emitted by cell phones and its potential role in the development of brain cancer.
When the Interphone Study results were finally released (years behind schedule), they appeared inconclusive. They found no overall increased risk of brain tumors for cell phone users—something that most of the mainstream press latched on to when reporting the findings.
However, the study group did acknowledge that “heavy users” of cell phones had an approximately 80 percent increased risk of glioma, a life-threatening and often-fatal brain tumor, after 10 years of cell phone use.
What was the definition of a heavy user?
About two hours—per month!
When this study was conducted (1999–2004), cell phone use had not yet exploded to the extent it has today. Now, after two decades have passed since the study began, the average American uses their cell phone more than three and a half hours per day.60
This significant finding did not garner much attention, except by the IARC, which went on to host a working group of 31 scientists from 14 different countries in May 2011.
This committee reviewed all available scientific literature, looking specifically for studies that examined the effects of consumer exposure to wireless telephones, occupational exposure to radar and microwaves, and environmental exposure to radio, TV, and wireless signals.
This review included the Interphone Study, as well as another study published by Lennart Hardell, a leading brain tumor researcher and professor of oncology and cancer epidemiology at Örebro University Hospital in Sweden. Dr. Hardell found that the risks of brain tumors doubled or even tripled, depending on the type of tumor, in cell phone users after 10 years of cellular phone use.61
Largely because of its review, the IARC finally concluded that exposure to cell phone radiation is “possibly carcinogenic to humans” and gave it a Group 2B classification. This is the same category as the pesticide DDT, lead, gasoline engine exhaust, burning coal, and dry-cleaning chemicals, to name just a few.
While this was an important piece of progress in establishing the potential for harm, it stopped short of designating microwave radiation and EMFs as category 2A—“probably carcinogenic to humans”—which is the next step up from “possibly.”
Since then, the U.S. government has dithered on warning the public about the hazards of cell phone use: In 2014, the CDC updated its website to state: “We recommend caution in cell phone use.”
That’s pretty strong language from an agency that had previously said any risks “likely are comparable to other lifestyle choices we make every day.” It only lasted a few weeks, however, before the language was removed, along with text that specifically warned against the heightened health risks for children.62
The most consistent voice of reason has come from the scientific community. In 2015, 190 EMF scientists from 39 countries issued the International EMF Scientist Appeal to the United Nations calling for the WHO to adopt “more protective exposure guidelines for non-ionizing electromagnetic fields (EMF) in the face of increasing exposures from many sources.”63
The late spokesperson Martin Blank, Ph.D., announced the appeal.
We are scientists engaged in the study of biological and health effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields (EMF). Based upon peer-reviewed, published research, we have serious concerns regarding the ubiquitous and increasing exposure to EMF generated by electric and wireless devices.
Thankfully, some people are listening to the science. In 2016, in the wake of the release of the first round of findings of the National Toxicology Program, Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, released an official statement.
For years, the understanding of the potential risk of radiation from cell phones has been hampered by a lack of good science. This report from the National Toxicology Program (NTP) is good science. The NTP report linking radiofrequency radiation (RFR) to two types of cancer marks a paradigm shift in our understanding of radiation and cancer risk.64
This was an about-face for the American Cancer Society, which has long been a denier of risk. Of course, we need more than just talk. We need action.
History has shown that an admission of the potential health hazards of EMFs will not happen without considerable legal pressure, and that it can take many decades for widespread changes in behavior to occur.
In many of the iconic movies and television programs of the late 20th century, the main characters smoked incessantly—Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, James Dean in Rebel without a Cause, and the TV series The Twilight Zone, in which Rod Serling was the smoking moderator who ultimately died from lung cancer.
Watching these programs now, the smoking looks odd—a time stamp of a different era, when ignorance about the health effects of smoking was pervasive.
Perhaps at some point two or three decades down the road, the memory of everyone staring at their cell phones all day will seem outdated too. Perhaps this book will help that future come true on a faster timeline than the five decades it took for cigarettes to lose their widespread allure.
Once you review the mechanisms by which EMFs cause damage (which I cover in Chapter 4) and the science that links them to several diseases (which I will walk you through in Chapter 5), I believe you will realize that EMFs deserve the designation of a Group 1 carcinogen, the same as cigarettes.
However, there are strong arguments that EMFs are even more pernicious than cigarettes, because you can substantially control your exposure to cigarette smoke; the same cannot be said about your EMF exposure since EMFs are emitted by infrastructure such as ubiquitous cell phones, power lines, electrical wiring, Wi-Fi routers, and cell towers.
If the 50-year timeline of cigarettes’ rise and fall pertains here, that would put us at 2045–2050 before the overwhelming evidence comes crashing down on the wireless industry as it did to tobacco in 1998.
By the time those decades have passed, how many people will have become ill, or even died, due to their EMF exposure? Especially considering that, just as with cigarettes, it can take decades for damage to manifest. As Robert N. Proctor, a professor at Columbia University, explained in his submitted written expert testimony in the 2002 federal court case United States v. Philip Morris USA:
It might take 20, 30, or even 40+ years for a tobacco cancer to develop after onset of exposure (this is the so-called “time lag” or “latency”).65
Exposure to EMFs also has a long time lag. Brain cancer, in particular, can take 40 years to develop. Survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example, are still developing malignant tumors more than 65 years after their radiation exposure.66 One can only imagine how high the prevalence of cell phone and Wi-Fi related diseases will be in another 20 or 30 years.
A 1969 memo written by an executive at Brown & Williamson, a large tobacco company at the time, concisely sums up this strategy by the phrase “Doubt is our product.”67 Doubt is the wireless industry’s product as well.
It has learned, from Big Tobacco’s example, that it needs not disprove the idea that its products carry health risks; it only has to provide enough evidence to the contrary that consumers are lulled into a false sense of security. This tactic not only ensures sales, it also wards off regulatory measures and deflects blame for any illnesses or deaths from its products.
While the world waits for the evidence to be deemed conclusive, you, your family, and our entire society are all guinea pigs in an experiment that has the potential to handicap future generations with potentially insurmountable health consequences.
The wireless industry, just like the tobacco industry before it, will continue its strategies and claim that the science is not yet settled and we need more research. It will continue to deny any link between its products and cancer while the evidence to the contrary slowly and steadily piles up, just as it did for cigarette smoking. If you value your health, you simply must act now to protect yourself and your loved ones.