OVERPOWERED

Similarly, in 2008 FOX News announced, “Study: Cell Phones Could Be More Dangerous Than Cigarettes,”² and three years before that, CNET’s Molly Wood wrote an article entitled “The Cell Phone Industry: Big Tobacco 2.0?”³

These cultural references point to a shared health risk from the use of these products. However, the most notable similarity between the wireless and tobacco industries involves the ways in which these companies have responded to scientific research that challenges their profit models.

You’ll note that Nick Naylor does not advise the executives to claim that cell phone usage is benign. Instead, he suggests challenging the existence of any proven link. In other words, don’t claim “cell phones are safe.” Instead, claim “there’s no proof cell phones are dangerous.” And this is frequently what we hear. Though some executives go so far as to claim that cell phones are nontoxic, you’ll note that, more typically, they state that there is a lack of conclusive proof that non-ionizing EMF is carcinogenic.

In other words, the wireless industry has adopted a strategy of manufacturing doubt about the potential negative health effects of their product. Sadly, this strategy has a proven track record. The tobacco industry used it for decades to fend off regulation and negative public perceptions. As one executive from Brown Williamson (BW), a large tobacco company, infamously wrote in a 1969 memo eventually leaked to the public: “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ [linking smoking with disease] that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”⁴

Industry’s role in scientific research (such as that described in the previous chapter) is by no means new. A range of controversial industries have been involved in conducting studies to support the safety of their products. But no industry has managed this type of public relations dilemma more effectively than the tobacco industry. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, tobacco companies used deceptive and often blatantly false claims in an effort to reassure the public that their products were safe. For years, consumers had been exposed to advertisements showing the value of smoking. And backing up the claims were pictures of doctors advocating the benefits not simply of smoking, but of smoking particular brands. What emerged were highly successful, evocative advertising campaigns that strategically used doctors and celebrities to endorse cigarettes. More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette! was the famous catch phrase for a Camels advertising campaign that began in 1946 and ran for eight years in both magazines and on the radio.

Over the years (since the passage of time is required for detrimental health effects to emerge), serious concerns began to emerge about the dangers of smoking. Those led to increasing calls for the regulation. Regardless of the validity of the concerns, the tobacco industry mounted major campaigns to prevent any and all restrictions.

A key part of the tobacco industry’s efforts involved hiring scientists to conduct seemingly sophisticated studies ostensibly aimed at determining whether smoking was, in fact, dangerous. Over and over again, their results showed that no clear determination could be made. The studies were summarized in 2008 in Doubt Is Their Product by scientist and former government regulator David Michaels. Michaels served as Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environment, Safety, and Health during the Clinton administration. As Michaels so astutely points out, the industry sought to create doubt about the health charge without actually denying it. It was a highly effective strategy to fend off any regulatory action or corporate responsibility for the fatal impact of their actions. The industry did not conduct research to find out the facts; it carried out research to create enough doubt so as to undermine any challengers’ claims and thereby block any action. “No industry has employed the strategy of promoting doubt and uncertainty more effectively, for a longer period, and with more serious consequences,” writes Michaels.⁵

“This era of over-the-top hucksterism went on for decades, and it was all blatantly false,” said Dr. Robert J. Jackler of the Stanford School of Medicine.⁶ Jackler produced a fascinating, retrospective look at the advertising crusade that defined the tobacco industry’s cunning tactics in an exhibit entitled Not a Cough in a Carload: Images Used by Tobacco Companies to Hide the Hazards of Smoking.

Meanwhile, the scientific evidence continued to build, leading to the first major study that causally linked smoking with lung cancer. Published in 1950 by American scientists Ernst L. Wynder and Evarts A. Graham, the report indicated that 96.5% of lung-cancer patients are moderate to heavy smokers.⁷ Ironically, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which published this study, simultaneously ran cigarette advertisements. Wynder followed up with another landmark study showing that painting cigarette tar on the backs of mice created tumors in 44% of the mice within a year of such exposure.⁸

Even so, the advertisements persisted. One for Chesterfield cigarettes in 1952 claims, “no adverse effects on nose, throat and sinuses” after medical specialists observed smokers for 10 months. That same year, a significant turning point came when an influential article in Reader’s Digest titled “Cancer by Carton” detailed the dangers of cigarettes for the mainstream public. Within a year, cigarette sales fell for the first time in more than two decades.

The word had finally reached the people, and the tobacco industry had to scramble. They decided that the best way to refute science was with science. So, in 1954, the tobacco industry launched the “Sound Science” campaign by creating the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC), which later became the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR). It purported to fund independent scientific research, asserting that public health was “paramount to every other consideration in our business.”⁹

TIRC launched a multifaceted, multinational strategy to mislead consumers about the established dangers associated with smoking cigarettes. In a true blitz campaign, it ran a full-page promotion in more than 400 newspapers aimed at an estimated 43 million Americans titled “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers.” Its opening words read:

RECENT REPORTS on experiments with mice have given wide publicity to a theory that cigarette smoking is in some way linked with lung cancer in human beings.

Although conducted by doctors of professional standing, these experiments are not regarded as conclusive in the field of cancer research. However, we do not believe that any serious medical research, even though its results are inconclusive should be disregarded or lightly dismissed.

At the same time, we feel it is in the public interest to call attention to the fact that eminent doctors and research scientists have publicly questioned the claimed significance of these experiments.¹⁰

During the 1950s, tobacco companies greatly increased their advertising budgets from $76 million in 1953 to $122 million in 1957. The TIRC spent another $948,151 in 1954 alone and referred to it as the “1954 emergency.”

This continues even today. As just one recent example, in 2002 Dr. Ragnar Rylander, Professor of Environmental Health at Gothenburg University, was revealed to have received significant sums in research grants and consulting fees from Philip Morris over a 30-year period. Without disclosing this financial relationship to his employer, or in any of the multiple papers that he published, he presented data minimizing and denying negative health effects of tobacco and secondhand smoke. Rylander repeatedly denied these accusations until his contract was uncovered in the Philip Morris archives.¹¹ A Swiss court in Geneva subsequently found that Rylander failed to fulfill his “moral obligation” to disclose these financial ties,¹² declaring in their final ruling that “Geneva has indeed been the centre of an unprecedented scientific fraud in so far as Ragnar Rylander, acting in his capacity of associate professor at the University, took advantage of its influence and reputation, not hesitating to put science at the service of money and not heeding the mission entrusted to this public institution.”¹³

Eventually, the overwhelming body of scientific evidence led to the 1964 US Surgeon General’s report citing health risks related to smoking. The following year, the US Congress passed the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, requiring a surgeon general’s warning on cigarette packs. But instead of putting the kibosh on Big Tobacco’s activities, the FDA warning label conveniently provided them with a legal loophole that removed any corporate responsibility. And so, they continued selling a product that kills, promoting the “safe cigarette” in the 1970s and then battling the regulation of secondhand smoke in the 1980s. Meanwhile, the death toll continued to rise.

The breaking point finally came when Jeffrey Wigand, a BW tobacco executive, put himself on the line as a whistle-blower. He found himself compelled to speak out after watching the 1994 US congressional hearing where eight Big Tobacco executives testified under oath that “nicotine was not addictive.” As the head of research and development for BW, Wigand knew otherwise. As depicted in the dramatic film The Insider, Wigand’s insider testimony revealed that Big Tobacco was consciously deceiving the public and ultimately led to the multibillion dollar settlement in 1997 that required tobacco companies to pay out $368 billion in health-care costs due to smoking-related illnesses.

Wigand’s testimony has been further supported by millions of internal documents that have since come to light—many of which were publicly released by Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, in his book The Cigarette Papers. A long-time critic of the tobacco industry, Glantz received an anonymous package in 1994 delivered to his office at the University of California at San Francisco. It contained more than 4,000 pages of internal tobacco-industry documents sent by a secret source named “Mr. Butts.” A thorough analysis of the documents revealed in detail the strategies behind Big Tobacco’s deceitful practices and exposed the fact that they knew about the health dangers all along.

Today, approximately 80 years after German scientists produced the first data suggesting a possible link between tobacco smoking and lung cancer,¹⁴ the health risks of smoking are clearly understood by the public and the media, tobacco sales and smoking in public establishments are more tightly regulated, and some cities around the United States have even gone so far as to institute outright bans on smoking anywhere within their borders (other than private homes). But it took a long time. Tobacco’s strategy of creating doubt successfully defended significant profits for decades as millions died from lung cancer.

Is the wireless industry following the same playbook, perfected by the tobacco industry? To help answer this question, it is instructive to look at the recently concluded Interphone study.

The large-scale Interphone study was initiated in 2000 and formally concluded in February 2012 (with some results having been released earlier), and its results received a great deal of media coverage. Interphone was created by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a division of the World Health Organization (WHO). The actual research was conducted at 25 separate research institutions, across 13 countries.¹⁵ The IARC coordinated these participating institutions and their funding; the IARC’s Interphone International Study Group (IISG), with 21 scientists led by Dr. Elisabeth Cardis, administered the progress of the study and how the data was analyzed, interpreted, and published.

Interphone’s goal was clear and simple: to evaluate whether any link could be established between cell phone usage and occurrences of four types of cancer in human tissue that is most exposed to cell phone radiation: glioma and meningioma (tumors of the brain), cancer of the parotid gland (a type of salivary gland), and schwannoma (tumors of the acoustic nerve).¹⁶

In general, with epidemiological studies (studies of health issues in a population), the greater the number of subjects, the more accurate the findings are apt to be—it is not advisable to draw conclusions when the number of subjects is relatively small. With Interphone, this was not a problem. Data was collected from large populations in all 13 participating countries. Indeed, the studies that took place in Denmark, Finland, Israel, Norway, and Sweden encompassed almost the entire population of each nation.¹⁷ Interphone produced 3 results papers,¹⁸ 4 validation studies,¹⁹ and 36 individual studies from the individual participating research institutions.²⁰ All told, Interphone represents the largest case-control study of mobile phone use and these types of cancer in subjects with at least a decade of reported exposure.

The study found that cell phone usage (including regular usage for a decade or longer) is not linked to increased risk of brain tumors (specifically, glioma or meningioma)—though there may be some relationship between heavy cell phone usage (the top 10% of users) and up to a 40% greater risk for occurrence of gliomas on the same side of the head as cell phone use. The overall results of the study are summarized in the final IARC report:

Overall, no increase in risk of glioma or meningioma was observed with use of mobile phones. There were suggestions of an increased risk of glioma at the highest exposure levels, but biases and error prevent a causal interpretation. The possible effects of long-term heavy use of mobile phones require further investigation.²¹

Of course, running such a large study costs a significant amount of money—€19.2 million (roughly $25.5 million in 2010 dollars) according to IARC’s 2010 report. Approximately 29% of this funding (roughly $7.4 million in 2010) was provided by wireless-industry sources and the remainder from European public institutions (the US governmentdid not participate in Interphone). The Mobile Manufacturers’ Forum (MMF) and the GSM Association donated €3.5 million of funding (roughly 2010 US $4.6 million)—though the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) established a funding firewall to help ensure scientific independence.²² The IARC states that the organizations that funded Interphone did not have access to any of the results prior to publication (though they, along with other specific groups, could review the articles seven days prior to their actual publication).²³ However, the fact that the wireless and cell phone industries paid for nearly half of the study’s cost by definition calls into question the study’s independence.

The existence of controls put in place by the IARC to separate the scientists from the pressure of funding was admirable. However, one could have more faith in the integrity of the process if the IARC would make public its conflict-of-interest statements from the Interphone project—something that the IARC and WHO have consistently refused to do. In the absence of such disclosures, observers are left with little confidence that there are no Rylanders or Ahlboms—or, indeed, Anders Ahlbom himself, who was still in good standing for the early part of Interphone’s history—and possibly influencing or skewing the research.

Given the massive scope of the study, Interphone would seem to go a long way toward settling the issue. Except, it is important to note the following part of the above-cited conclusion: “biases and error prevent a causal interpretation.” How can it be that the largest such study, spanning hundreds of thousands of participants, across 13 countries, costing tens of millions of dollars could produce results that are so riddled with “biases and error” as to prevent interpretation?

The biases and errors to which the IARC refers are found largely in the design of the study—the type of data Interphone was structured to collect and how it was collected—factors that should have been avoided in the planning stage. One of the most significant design flaws was the researchers’ reliance on people’s memories. The wireless networks would not permit researcher access to actual cell phone records, so researchers resorted to asking individual subjects to recall their cell phone usage over time. Recalling how much time you spent on your phone last week or last month is difficult enough—asking participants to accurately estimate how much they used their phones 10 years ago is a pretty unreliable form of data collection.

Reliance on people’s memories in scientific studies skews the results with something called recall bias, generally yielding highly unreliable data. Indeed, one of the Interphone studies outfitted subjects with special equipment to track their cell phone usage, generating a detailed and accurate log. “When this log was compared with the ‘recalled’ usage, there were wide and random variations: some users underreported, while others overreported use.”²⁴ And, of course, any study that relies on an individual’s memory, also implicitly relies on that individual being alive; this eliminates any potential subjects who may have already died from the cancers being investigated (leading to an underestimation of risk in the results).

Overall, Interphone had significant difficulty recruiting respondents. The refusal rate was 41%—a rate that many statisticians believe taint any results garnered from the respondents who do accept.²⁵ This creates what researchers call selection bias, or a misrepresentation of actual populations in the study, leading to unreliable results. Another way in which the study’s design generated selection bias was in the location of respondents. As I mentioned, in five countries Interphone collected nationwide data. However, in seven others,²⁶ the data were based on responses from subjects primarily residing in urban centers.²⁷ Those who live in urban areas are likely to be closer to a cell tower than those who live in a rural setting. The farther one is from a cell tower, the more power one’s cell phone must generate in order to communicate with the tower. Thus, the elimination of rural subjects excluded those who, in general, are exposed to the most powerful EMF radiation from their phones.

Another significant selection bias in the study was the omission of young subjects. Children and adults up to 30 (along with those 60 and older) were excluded from Interphone, again, by design. However, children (who continue to grow and undergo a higher rate of cellular division and reproduction than adults) are more susceptible to developing cancer from exposure to carcinogens. (And, as we know, children and twentysomethings do use cell phones.) Excluding this higher-risk population from the study would lead to an undercalculation of risk in the results.

Another design flaw regards latency time, or the length of time it takes the cancer to develop. Most cancers have latency periods of over 10 years; brain tumors are believed to take up to 25 years to form. Thus, analyzing a period of 10 years would likely not provide sufficient time for brain tumors or other cancers to become symptomatic, leading to an undercalculation of risk in the results. Jack Siemiatycki, the Canada Chair in Environmental Epidemiology at the University of Montreal, explains that “if it turns out that cellphones cause brain cancer, but in a 15- to 20-year time period before the tumours manifest themselves clinically, we [Interphone] would not have been able to pick this up.”²⁸

Further, while Interphone was designed to survey 10 years’ worth of cell phone use (an admirable goal, given the shorter duration of many other studies), cell phone use was not widespread in 1990 (10 years prior to the initiation of the study)—and even by 1994 (10 years before the end of Interphone’s data-collection period), cell phone use was still quite small by today’s standards. While study subjects may have been active cell phone users in 2000, they were likely not in 1990 or 1994, and thus most respondents would not have had sufficient duration for the cancers to become symptomatic.

For example, of the nine Interphone studies relating to brain tumors, only 0.61% of subjects who reported cancers and 10% of controls had used a cell phone for 10 years or more; cell phone use of greater than five years was reported among 18% of reported cancers and 21% of controls.²⁹ In other words, the results included only a very small number of long-term cell phone users—so small that it is impossible to draw any conclusions regarding the possible link between cell phone use and brain tumors.

Interphone’s definition of exposure in itself is one that would lead to an underassessment of risk. By design, a regular user was defined as anyone who had an average of at least one phone call per week for 6 or more months—this definition classified individuals with very low exposures to cell phone radiation in the group of “regular” users, thus underassessing risk. Further, Interphone’s subject matter was restricted to cell phones; individuals who used cordless phones at home did not count as having been exposed. Cordless phones, like cell phones, emit RF/MW radiation. Still, even though these individuals were exposed to the same type of EMF radiation, in the same location of the body, Interphone classified these individuals as unexposed, skewing the results with increased rates of negative health outcomes from EMF exposure among those designated “unexposed.”

And, of course, by design, Interphone examined only four types of cancer. However, as we’ve seen in our investigation, reputable scientific research has linked RF and MW exposure to many different types of cancers (such as leukemia, melanoma, and lymphoma), as well as other negative health outcomes in humans, such as Alzheimer’s. Restricting the investigation to four types of cancers is necessarily going to underrepresent any risk from EMF exposure.

Interphone had many design flaws that would preclude the possibility of reaching useful conclusions. Not surprisingly, this led to feuding among the participating scientists over the interpretation of data,³⁰ which generated significant delays in the release of the results—delays that the European Parliament eventually condemned as “deplorable.”³¹ The data-collection phase of Interphone ended in 2004, and the results were scheduled for publication in 2006.³² Some studies were published separately, but the official, final Interphone report was not published and made available to the scientific community until February 2012 (though, as can occur in scientific studies, it is dated October 2011).³³ IARC formally shuttered Interphone a few days later.³⁴

Overall, Interphone concludes that heavy cell phone usage could be linked to brain tumors (though “biases and error prevent causal interpretation”). Confusingly, the report also indicates that the data reveals a reduced risk of brain tumors stemming from cell phone use—a baffling conclusion that has led “most epidemiologists, including the authors of Interphone, to consider that “the results point to a systemic flaw in the trial.”³⁵

Interphone also concludes that no link exists between cell phone use and acoustic neuromas (cancer of the auditory nerve)—though again, one Interphone study with data from five participating countries reported an 80% greater risk on the side of the head where the cell phone is held after ten years of use.³⁶ In the end, the IISG refused to pool and analyze the data on tumors of the partoid gland—leaving individual countries to report individually (such as the work by Dr. Sadetzki in Israel, discussed in chapter 5).

In short, each of the findings was ambiguous, leaving room for individual interpretation of results. Interphone itself explained that no real conclusions could be drawn. Exacerbating matters, the IARC has refused to release the actual data collected under the Interphone project (though some individual researchers have published subsets of the data). Dr. Lennart Hardell’s highly regarded research on brain tumor risk from cell phone use, discussed earlier in this book, is challenged by the Interphone reports, and he has asked that the data be made available. However, despite repeated pleas from him and many other investigators, the only study-wide information provided are the published reports containing the ambiguous analyses.³⁷ As a result, despite the amount of time, money, effort, and data that Interphone represents, the study and its conclusions are almost entirely devoid of any scientific value.

While Interphone produced data that was, at a minimum, questionable due to the amount of “biases and errors,” it represented such a large effort that the results were widely reported in the global media. Not surprisingly, the confusing and often contradictory analyses of the findings meant that the media coverage was similarly confusing and contradictory, doing little to help the public understand this complex issue. CNN led with the headline “Study Fails to End Debate on Cancer, Cell Phone Link,” explaining that “long-awaited data from an international study have shown no evidence of increased risk of brain tumors associated with mobile phones, except in people who have the most exposure. But design flaws of the Interphone study, which is partly industry funded, suggest that the latest results cannot be taken to mean that cell phones and brain cancer are unrelated, critics say.”³⁸

That’s a fair enough reading of the IARC analysis, but it does little to help explain the Interphone results to the average reader. What’s more, the results were sufficiently ambiguous that Interphone researcher Daniel Krewski of the University of Ottawa in Ontario could explain, in the very same CNN article, that the study was “scientifically sound” and produced “reassuring” results. “It tells us that we don’t have an epidemic of brain cancer on our hands associated with mobile phones.”³⁹ The New York Times covered the 2010 results in an article entitled “Do Cellphones Cause Brain Cancer?” The author explains that “trials like Interphone are undertaken in the hope that they cleanse the field of doubts. In fact, Interphone achieved just the opposite effect: it ignited even more puzzling questions. Over all, the study found little evidence for an association between brain tumors and cellphones.”⁴⁰

As the Wall Street Journal sarcastically stated regarding the study’s results, “using a cellphone seems to protect against two types of brain tumors. Even the researchers didn’t quite believe it.”⁴¹ The journal Nature reported on Interphone in an article entitled “No Link Found between Mobile Phones and Cancer”; though, despite the title, in the article the author admits that “unfortunately, the results from this study are not entirely straightforward . . . Even the researchers involved in the trial do not all agree on the meaning of their work.”⁴²

Demonstrating just how confusing the Interphone study could be, FOX News reported that “an increased risk of brain cancer is not established from the data from Interphone,”⁴³ while in a separate story it reported that “the WHO’s Interphone investigation’s results showed, ‘a significantly increased risk’ of some brain tumors ‘related to use of mobile phones for a period of ten years or more.’”⁴⁴ Around the world, the picture was much the same.

Unfortunately, public health groups did little to clarify or interpret the results, echoing the same message as reported in the media. The American Cancer Society explained that Interphone’s results “do not establish a definitive link between cell phone use and cancer, but they don’t rule one out, either . . . [It] may have raised more questions than it answered.”⁴⁵ The World Health Organization claimed that “to date, no adverse health effects have been established for mobile phone use . . . an increased risk of brain tumors is not established from Interphone data,” though they proceeded to call for more studies into long-term exposure.⁴⁶ The Independent Advisory Group on Non-Ionizing Radiation (AGNIR) of the British Health Protection Agency concluded that Interphone “provides no clear, or even strongly suggestive, evidence of a hazard,” adding that this “is consistent with the findings of most other epidemiological studies that have examined the relation of brain tumours to use of mobile phones.”⁴⁷ They concluded this even though the UK Health Protection Agency itself reported that “biases and errors” within the study have restricted conclusions that can be drawn.⁴⁸

Some of the media summaries were less accurate, omitting mention of the possible increased risk of brain tumors for heavy cell phone users, demonstrated by Interphone. Then internationally respected Professor Anders Ahlbom (prior to his outing as an industry-paid stooge discussed in the previous chapter)—who had repeatedly served as an expert on cell phone radiation for WHO and had helped establish EU cell phone radiation safety standards—explained that “Interphone shows the same results as all other research studies so far, namely that there is nothing to be worried about.”⁴⁹ Similarly, the Italian National Institute of Health concluded that “overall, the study do [sic] not report any increase of risk for brain tumors associated with mobile phone use, not even among the long-term user (more than 10 years).”⁵⁰ Similarly, the US National Cancer Institute reported that “cell phone users have no increased risk of two of the most common forms of brain cancer . . . There was no evidence of risk with progressively increasing number of calls, longer call time, or time since the start of the use of cell phones.”⁵¹

From a review of these and similar articles and reports, one could reasonably conclude that Interphone was both meaningful and unreliable, that the results demonstrate no cause for alarm. “This study did not confirm or dismiss the possible association between cell phones and brain tumors. That’s the bottom line,” summarizes Interphone researcher Dr. Siegal Sadetzki.⁵²

Interphone represents the largest and most ambitious research endeavor into the epidemiology of the negative health effects of exposure to EM radiation—particularly, in this case, RF and MW radiation emitted by cell phones. If the studies had been well designed, the results could have been invaluable. Instead, what we see are ambiguous and vague conclusions drawn from fundamentally flawed data, with the discussion in the media being no better informed as a result.

Even worse, as Professor Jorn Olsen at the School of Public Health of Aarhus University in Denmark explains, not only should the Interphone funding “have been used better by setting up a large-scale cohort study that could address other potential endpoints besides cancer,”⁵³ but “the Interphone Study dried up available resources for funding and made the public and funding agencies immune to the epidemiological results.”⁵⁴ There is not enough money spent on this type of research to begin with; Interphone consumed a significant portion of it for the better part of a decade.

It’s not necessarily the case that Interphone was designed to produce faulty data; however, if one wanted to create a study that generated largely useless results, the design of Interphone would be an effective means of doing so. Similarly, it may have been unintentional that the study extended eight years longer than planned and consumed much of the funds available for this kind of research, but this reduced the number of competent studies that could have been done to answer the questions of health risk. What a waste of time and money!

Similar to the tobacco industry’s infamous “doubt is our product” memo, another leaked document outlined Brown and Williamson’s objectives at the time:

Objective No. 1: To set aside in the minds of millions the false conviction that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and other diseases; a conviction based on fanatical assumptions, fallacious rumors, unsupported claims and the unscientific statements and conjectures of publicity-seeking opportunists.

Objective No. 2: To lift the cigarette from the cancer identification as quickly as possible and restore it to its proper place of dignity and acceptance in the minds of men and women in the marketplace of American free enterprise.

Objective No. 3: To expose the incredible, unprecedented and nefarious attack against the cigarette, constituting the greatest libel and slander ever perpetrated against any product in the history of free enterprise . . .

Objective No. 4: To unveil the insidious and developing pattern of attack against the American free enterprise system, a sinister formula that is slowly eroding American business with the cigarette obviously selected as one of the trial targets.⁵⁵

With the exception of the fourth objective (defenders of the wireless industry tend to imply their opponents are Luddites rather than communists), the others sound very familiar. All you have to do is remove the word “lung,” replace “cigarette” with “cell phone,” and “smoking” with “usage.”

Objective No. 1: To set aside in the minds of millions the false conviction that cell phone usage causes cancer and other diseases; a conviction based on fanatical assumptions, fallacious rumors, unsupported claims and the unscientific statements and conjectures of publicity-seeking opportunists.

Objective No. 2: To lift the cell phone from the cancer identification as quickly as possible and restore it to its proper place of dignity and acceptance in the minds of men and women in the marketplace of American free enterprise.

Objective No. 3: To expose the incredible, unprecedented and nefarious attack against the cell phone, constituting the greatest libel and slander ever perpetrated against any product in the history of free enterprise . . .

The analogy of cell phones to tobacco naturally begs the question, does the wireless industry know more than it is letting on? As a scientist, I am struck by the volume of scientific evidence that has been conveniently overlooked or dismissed when it comes to the EMF “debate” and the apparent “controversy” when it comes to protecting public health. When looking at the techniques and arguments used by the wireless industry, I have no doubt that doubt is their product.

Some insider documents have already begun to surface that indicate that the cell phone industry indeed knows more about the EMF health dangers than they are letting on. Two in particular have been released under the Freedom of Information Act to Microwave News. The first was the “war-games” memo, discussed in the previous chapter, revealing Motorola’s intent to discredit Dr. Henry Lai and his work.

The other was written in 1993, the same year that the Reynard lawsuit hit national headlines and jump-started the industry’s $25- million WTR initiative. This internal memo at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) noted that the data “strongly suggest” that microwaves can “accelerate the development of cancer.” It went on to give supporting details: Drs. Mays Swicord and Larry Cress of FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) in Rockville, Maryland, wrote, “Of approximately eight chronic animal experiments known to us, five resulted in increased numbers of malignancies, accelerated progression of tumors, or both.” (This is the same Mays Swicord discussed in the prior chapter, who later became director of research at Motorola and advocated ending research on biological effects of EMF.) However, the FDA played down these findings in the public statements at the time and subsequently abandoned the oversight of the CTIA’s research program, leaving it in the sole care of the wireless industry.

What we see happening today with EMF science (and over the past 90 years with tobacco science), has happened repeatedly, across a variety of industries involving global warming, asbestos, lead, plastics, and other toxic materials. Companies have regularly skewed the scientific literature, manufactured and magnified scientific uncertainty, and influenced policy decisions to keep the public confused.

History shows us that it can take 30 to 100 years between the first early warning signs and the regulatory action taken to protect public health (see chart on page 154). The scientific evidence for EMF, however, has finally reached a tipping point. It is calling us to stop arguing the science, and to move into acceptance that EMFs are indeed hazardous.

Unfortunately, the success of the wireless industry at manufacturing doubt has significantly slowed the progress in the establishment of biologically based safety standards to protect consumers. As we will see in the next chapter, safety standards and regulatory frameworks around the world are based on flawed and outdated assumptions about the health risks associated with EMF exposure.

Above chart is based on Table 1 by David Gee in Pathophysiology 16:217-231, 2009.

Chapter 9

DOUBT, FROM TOBACCO TO INTERPHONE