The Truth About Mobile Phone And Wireless Radiation: Dr Devra Davis (Transcript)

Let me just introduce Dr. Debra Davis, who doesn’t probably need an awful lot of introduction, but Dr. Debra Davis is a visiting professor of medicine at the Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School and also in Turkey at the Ondokuz Mayis University.

She’s an expert studying electromagnetic radiation for mobile phones and wireless transmitting devices at present. She was the founding director of the Center for Environmental Oncology, which was the first such center in the world and was established at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. She was looking at the environmental factors that contribute to cancers.

In 2007, she founded a non-profit, Environmental Health Trust, to provide basic research and education about environmental impact on health hazards. She served as President Clinton’s appointee on the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board in the United States from 1994 to 1999. There was an independent executive branch of the government that investigated all the effects of chemical accidents and how to prevent and mitigate against them.

She was also Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary for Health in the Department of Health and Human Services in the United States, and as such has counseled many leading officials in the United States, United Nations, World Bank, European Environmental Agency, the Pan-American Health Organization, and the World Bank.

She holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology, a Master of Arts in Sociology. She has a Ph.D. in Science from the University of Chicago, and she has a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology from the John Hopkins University, a lot of degrees. She has also more than 200 publications, and she has been published in Lancet and the Journal of American Medical Associations, which are some of the top journals in the field of medical research.

And she, of course, has publications in Scientific American and the New York Times. Deborah Davis, we are very pleased to listen to the truth about mobile phone and wireless radiation. All yours.

Dr Devra Davis – Epidemiologist and electromagnetic radiation expert

Thank you very much, Dean Mareels. I’m honored to be here. It’s a privilege to see so many of you. I must say, I’m thrilled to be at this great university, which has a tradition of open and democratic discussion, and I look forward to having a frank and full conversation, as we say in the diplomatic world.

Because the issue I’m going to talk with you about is, there isn’t one truth, of course. Truth is a relative term. At one point, the truth was the world was flat. When we talk about truth in science, of course, it’s always relative.

But there are now more than 6 billion cell phones in the world today, 8 billion wireless transmitting devices, more than 50 billion are anticipated to form the Internet of Things, and we have to recognize that we don’t know a lot about the public health and environmental effects of this form of radiation.

You have briefly, you’ve mentioned some of my career. I won’t go through this in any great detail, but I would say to you that probably the most important thing I did, and I see many people in this room aren’t even old enough to remember it. But a long time ago, you used to have smoke on airplanes. People could smoke tobacco on airplanes.

And I was involved as a young scientist in the committee that actually reviewed the data and recommended that there be no smoking on airplanes. You may be shocked to hear that it was even a question for science at the time, but it was.

And when I look at what we know now about mobile phone radiation, I see some very interesting similarities because there were a lot of questions that were raised about the safety of tobacco on airplanes, and they were, in fact, legitimate questions, things we did not know.

There are a lot of important questions to be asked about mobile phone radiation today without any doubt. But the reality is we’re not asking those questions, and with the exception of some researchers here and elsewhere, very little new research is being done in this field. So it’s a thrill to be here because Australia has been a leader in research in the field of electrical engineering and its applications to medicine, doing some of the most exciting work in the world and funded by institutions around the world, including the U.S. Department of Defense.

And I’ve worked at some of the top institutions in the world in science. And so when I first thought there could be something wrong with mobile phones, I actually owned three phones at the time. I own two now. Everybody has to downsize a bit. And I didn’t believe there was a problem, and I thought if there were a problem, I would know about it because, of course, I knew all about what was important in science.

Well, I was wrong. I liked the fact that I could call people or actually send them messages and expect an answer at all hours of the day and found it kind of fun in the beginning. And when somebody said to me there could be a problem with this with our health, I said, “Oh, don’t be ridiculous. If there was a problem, I’d know about it.”

Well, I was wrong. And what I now know is that information is being sent to people routinely to give them safety information. I’m going to ask you to help me out here by looking at how many of you have an iPhone. Now, I assume you didn’t all turn them off.

So for those of you who have an iPhone, would you nod, raise your hand again. I’d like you to share with your colleagues. So please go to the settings on your phone, all right? Please take a moment and nod when you’ve got there. All right. And be prepared to share, all right? Go to settings on the phone. You got there? All right.

Now, get to settings. Now go to about. I’m sorry, you have to go to general first. There’s a mistake here. You have to go to general, all right? Under general, under settings. Then go to about, which is at the top. You got there? About, yes, okay.

Now, you have to scroll all the way down to something you don’t normally see called legal. You got to legal? All right. Now, click on RF exposure. Now, you can read it later, but it’s basically telling you that you need to know that you cannot keep the phone directly next to your body without exceeding the as-tested exposure guidelines.

And by the way, the iPhone does it. I happen to know how to find it on the iPhone. I’m just learning the Android system myself. But all smartphones come with some information that basically says don’t keep the phone in your pocket or you will exceed the as-tested exposure guidelines.

Now, how many of you knew that before today? Well, this is a very well-informed audience relative to others. I want to thank Telstra because they actually are now giving people this information. And by the way, they’re one of the first telecom companies in the world to do this. And so I actually think it’s a good thing. They’re sending this message. How many of you have seen it? How many of you have actually looked at what it says?

Well, here’s what it says. This is what it says. And like most of you, I found messages like this annoying. But the reality is Telstra is telling you to use a hands-free device to keep a mobile phone away from the head and body to reduce mobile phone exposure. So that’s a good thing.

But on the other hand, I think that we all need to do better to give people information so that you have knowledge about how to reduce exposure. And I’m going to explain to you why we need to reduce exposure.

CELL PHONE STANDARDS

Let’s go back to almost 20 years ago when standards for cell phones were first set up. At that time, it was believed that the only thing you had to worry about was avoiding heat. That was the only effect you had to be concerned about. And so they employed the head of a very large person, a 220-pound male, who was at the top 98th percentile of military recruits in 1989 in the United States. And they set the standards to avoid heating up that fellow’s brain after a six-minute phone call.

Now, there’s probably one or two people in this room with a head that size. But the rest of you, like most of the world, have much smaller heads and relatively smaller bodies. And this standard, which is very much out of date, doesn’t take into account the fact that people the size of these two bright young people here in the front row are using these devices today with no thought that maybe they’re getting exposed to levels of radiation that have not been evaluated for their safety in young, developing brains.

Now, the electromagnetic spectrum, this is information from ARPANSA, actually goes all the way from the invisible to the visible, ionizing radiation, gamma rays, X-rays over here, and light here. This is from ARPANSA. You will see here they say FM radio, microwave oven, radiant heat. Of course, microwave oven actually happens to be of the same frequency as the cell phone, the mobile phone.

The mobile phone and the microwave oven use a very similar frequency. The difference between them is power. The power of the microwave oven is 1,000 watts. And of course, that’s power that can heat up a cup of water in maybe 60 seconds. The microwave oven, the mobile phone, the cordless phone, the Wi-Fi monitor, the baby monitor, they all use the same frequency. They differ in power.

They also differ because mobile phones and Wi-Fi devices emit pulsed microwave radiation. It’s the pulse, not the power, that appears to be biologically most important. The pulse that is erratic and irregular, like for thousands of minutes a month, for dozens of hours a week, over a lifetime, that irregular pulsed signal may be much more biologically important. In fact, the continuous wave signals have a lot of therapeutic effects as are being applied in medicine today.

This visualization from my colleague at the University of Athens shows you the variation in frequency, in amplitude, in pulse. All of these variables influence the properties a signal have and how it can affect a biological system. This is just to show you what happens in a four-second mobile phone call. This is power density, power density indicated here. And of course, a phone is on standby. It’s not doing too much.

But 900 times a minute, it’s looking for a signal. It says to the tower, “Where are you? Here I am. Where are you? Here I am.” It’s smart. That’s how it’s supposed to do. When the phone rings, the worst time for you to put a phone right next to your head is when you answer it and say hello. Because it’s smart and it goes to max power. They’re programmed to do that. Max power.

Now, it’s going to go to max power. You’re going to listen. And then it will go up and down and up and down. And again, it’s that variation. It’s the delta. It’s the cumulative integrative dose under the curve over a lifetime of exposure that looks to be biologically important.

Now, exposure is a kind of funny thing. There’s a rather widely distributed paper by Ken Foster and C.K. Chou that said that the exposure of an adult and the exposure of a child is identical. And therefore, there’s no real difference in how the radiation might be affecting them.

TWO-DIMENSIONAL MODELING

Well, let me explain something by showing off my daughter and my granddaughter. My granddaughter is a very light-skinned, red-haired, blue-eyed child. Her skin is very sensitive. My daughter is darker-haired like I am. If they have sunscreen on, they still will get a different dose of ultraviolet light even though they have the same exposure.

Because the exposure may be uniform, but the amount they will absorb differs because of the properties of the skin, the properties of the eye, the thinness of the skin, and a number of other variables. And those same things are relevant when it comes to thinking about cell phone radiation.

Now, way back in the dark ages when the standards were developed, two-dimensional modeling showed that children and smaller adults might absorb more radiation than larger adults. And this is scalar modeling that has now been superseded, done by Om Gandhi in 1996. Interestingly, and this is why I’m really delighted to be here, Dean, when he did this work in 1996, he was working with support from Motorola and the Department of Defense. And after he published this, he lost all his funding.

That’s why I’m really happy when you told me that Australia is not America. Because I think you have an opportunity to do something here in this great country. You have a tradition of independence in science and in this country that we do not have, unfortunately, on this issue in the United States.

So Professor Gandhi, with whom I’m collaborating now, updated his work in 2002, here showing you that a smaller adult head here, you see the amount of exposure is quite similar. But because the head is smaller, it will absorb proportionally more.

More recently, we have been working with colleagues at Porto Alegre, with Environmental Health Trust, and we have developed three-dimensional modeling with anatomically-based models using MRI to create the models with one-millimeter voxels. And what we have done is to show the difference in radiation dose in heads of different ages and sizes.

And I’ll just show you one example here, coming from our colleagues at the Swiss National Institute of Technology, the ITIS, which have produced some of the most brilliant work in the world in this field. And they have shown here, of course, that there is going to be greater exposure absorption into a younger head versus an older head.

This is another item from their website of target tissue dose for the infant with using a system called the virtual family. Is there anyone here who’s worked on the virtual family? It’s a really powerful and very sophisticated system that is used today to set standards for medical devices and surgical procedures, but it’s not used for mobile phone standards. I find that odd.

And I want to show you an example of some of the work that we are doing now that I’m releasing here for the first time. And this is a modeled microwave radiation dose of a six-year-old with greater levels to the frontal and temporal lobes, eyes, and cheek. And watch this here.

Now, yellow, white, and red are the hottest. And if you look carefully, you will see it’s going into the eye, the nose. Do it again, just so you’ll get to see it. And partly into the brainstem. Now, that’s just showing you that there’s going to be some exposure into that area of a young head. It doesn’t tell you that there’s any biological effect.

EXPOSURE TO THE REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS

Now, the next slide is going to show you something that might be of interest to students and faculty here. And that has to do with exposure to the reproductive organs. We call them the gonads. I think you say the testicles. And bone marrow. And look here at the radiation as it gets into the groin area.

And that’s just from having a mobile phone modeled into the pocket. And this, again, is based on normalized SAR with a dipole antenna. And there are many different variables you can alter in coming up with this kind of simulation. Right? The number of antenna, whether it’s GSM, CDMA, whether it’s simultaneously operating only one antenna or more than one. But we believe that this is the kind of work that needs to be done and that this institution might be in a position to do it.

And my colleagues from Brazil would be happy to share with you the modeling that we have done to date to generate this. But based on this work and other studies that have been done around the world, the United States magazine Consumer Reports recently recommended that nobody keep a phone in their pocket. Nobody. And, in fact, if phones were tested in pockets, they would exceed the as-tested exposure guidelines, which is why Telstra has recently issued that advice.

BABY SAFE PROJECT

Now, when it comes to pregnancy, we’re working with Yale University and more than 100 physicians and experts in the United States and around the world who are specialists in pregnancy. And we have been modeling exposure to the head at the end of pregnancy. And at the end of pregnancy, when, of course, the head, as any woman here knows, is right at the surface, if you’re lucky it’s at the surface and it’s not facing the spine, then you can get the greatest exposure because, of course, the skin is completely permeable to this radiation exposure.

And that’s why we’ve developed the Baby Safe Project with colleagues at Yale to advise pregnant women to protect their abdomens from mobile phone radiation as well as from iPads, which I should add iPads and other devices are called tablets because they belong on tables. They are tested 20 centimeters away from that big guy that I showed you before. 20 centimeters away. They are not approved to be held in the laps of little children, although millions of kids are having them now in schools.

Because the people involved in educational technology and those involved in public health research are not talking to one another. Because if they were, they would understand that you’re giving children a two-way microwave radiating device. And if you must give them such a device for learning purposes, put it on airplane mode so that it’s not sending and receiving signals as it does otherwise.

Now this is some new modeling, again, that we’ve developed with colleagues in Brazil and we can share with you how we’ve done it. We first start out with the MRI and create the model with one millimeter voxels and this is quite a bit of work goes into creating this. And here is what it looks like after a period of six minutes. That’s really not as bad as it might look because you see the red area only gets partway through the eye of the adult.

The one that we’re really concerned about is this one with the young child and this is a three-year-old brain that we modeled. And you see that by the end of that six-minute call, the peak radiation, yellow and red, is getting all the way into almost both eyes. And again, this is one call and it’s not going to kill anybody. It may not cause any biological effect whatsoever for one call or two calls or three calls.

But the question is what’s the cumulative impact of this kind of exposure? How do we evaluate it? How do we study it?

The problem we face is that right now we’re in the midst of an experiment on my grandchildren and your children, and we don’t have anybody to compare them with. We don’t have a control group in science. When you are given a drug, it’s usually been studied where some people get the drug and some people don’t get the drug, and they’re called the controls.

Then you see whether or not those who got the drug are healthier than those who did not. And when you get results, you can conclude if there is a difference between the exposed and the control group, that your drug has worked.

When it comes to mobile phone radiation, we’ve lost our ability to have a true control group, even now with young children. More than half of young children today have access to these devices, and I read this morning in The Age that something like 13% of children aged two can order their own apps. I mean, I find it hard to imagine how a parent would give a child aged two a device which was allowing them to order their own app.

So, where are we with respect to research on infants, toddlers, and young children and pregnancy?

Well, there’s almost no research underway, which again is why I’m delighted to be here to talk with you about what could be developed. Believe it or not, this is the iPotty.

Now, this is not a joke. I have actually talked to grandmothers, I’m one of them. My grandchildren did not have an iPotty, I promise you. Their father sometimes acts like he did. A lot of people today take devices into the bathroom all the time, but there are actually young children who will not go to the potty without their iPad. Does anybody know anybody like that? Any kids? Yes. Is that amazing?

And nobody’s even thinking about this as what it might mean for radiation exposure. And Parent Magazine called the iPad the best babysitter. I mean, if you need an iPad for a babysitter, you need to rethink having children. I understand giving cranky children something to distract them on a long car trip, but please put it on airplane mode. Don’t think that you’re doing something good for your child if you hand them a device and it’s a two-way microwave radio.

Now, I want to show you something that you may find hard to believe. But of course anybody who’s been around babies lately knows that this is what they do with anything you give them. That’s how they learn things, they put them in their mouth. But this is something that you have to watch to believe it. NATO may be familiar to some of you, and NATO for years has supported research on radar. Radar, of course, gave birth to the microwave oven.

How many of you know that? Okay, the first microwave oven was called a radar range. The guys figured out that they could cook things with radar, and they thought it was pretty cool. They actually discovered it because when guys would be standing on the deck and it was cold at night, they would warm themselves in front of the radar and if they had chocolate in their pocket, it would melt. So that’s how they decided to figure out what would happen if you beamed radar at things like hot dogs and corn, and soon enough that gave birth to the radar range.

But women didn’t like the idea of cooking with radar. Guys thought it was pretty cool. So they rekindled the name to microwaves. It sounded dainty and more palatable, and nowadays a microwave oven is a staple around the world. Experimental studies have been supported by NATO on radar for years, and one of the laboratories they’ve supported is that of Professor Nesrin Sahan and her colleagues.

And the Environmental Health Trust convened an international conference with her laboratory partners and the Ministry of Health of Turkey in 2011. And I want to show you briefly some of the work that developed from that laboratory. This is showing you cellular damage that occurred in animals that were prenatally exposed to mobile phone radiation that was produced by a computer simulating the mobile phone exposure under controlled conditions, right? Because you can’t really get rats to make phone calls. You’ve got to model the exposure.

And what they did is then they measured in. These are your controls that you compare things with, and these were the exposed. Prenatally exposed, just 15 minutes a day for seven days, not much exposure. But these are small animals, and they grow within three weeks. They reproduce. And what they were able to study was changes in liver malondialdehyde, which is a measure of peroxidation. It’s a measure of peroxidation. It’s a measure of damage to the liver, right?

So these animals basically had significant damage to their liver if they had been exposed prenatally compared to controls. Now, another group in Turkey has looked at prenatal effects on the brain and the testis. And, you know, a lot of countries, this is very important research that’s been done here. They looked at counting the number of cells in certain areas of the brain, the hippocampus, which is a critically important part of the brain.

And since I see there’s a lot of non-expert here, let me just explain that your hippocampus is pretty important to things like memory, balance, things like that. So studying effects on the hippocampus in animals is kind of a good way to anticipate effects that might develop on intelligence and other things. And they looked at newborn rats after they had been exposed prenatally and compared those who were exposed to those who were not exposed.

And they looked at their brain cells, the number of cells, their shape, et cetera, with established methods for testing this. And this article was published in Brain Research, which is a relatively high-impact journal. And what they showed was that prenatally exposed newborns have basically fewer cells in the hippocampus. Here’s the exposed, missing some cells. And here are the controls, which they’re compared with. And you can see here that these cells are—there’s more of them.

Here they’re more scattered. And in fact, they did another test of memory. Now, how do you test memory in an animal? You don’t have them fill out the crossword puzzle. You test memory in an animal with well-established protocols of learning. You teach them to run a maze and get a food reward. And you see how long it takes them to do that. And what they did—it’s a radial arm maze.

They trained these animals who were starving to get a food reward, right? And after they did that, they then saw how long did it take them to learn this if they had been prenatally exposed to mobile phone radiation. And what they found was that newborns that had been exposed took three times as long to find their way out of an experimental maze and made twice as many errors. And again, it’s a statistically valid method for evaluating learning.

SPERM RESEARCH

Now, closer to home, so to speak, between the brain and the testis, studies have been done here in Australia at Newcastle by a fellow who’s now the pro-chancellor of the university. And these studies have been done taking sperm from healthy men.

And one test tube gets exposed to cell phone radiation, and one test tube is not exposed to mobile phone radiation. And then the results are evaluated. And this is a measure of vitality. We measure how well the sperm swim. This is a measure of mobility, motility. This is a measure of mitochondrial DNA damage. They have three times as much damage on their DNA if they have been exposed to mobile phone radiation as compared to controls.

And now the issue is, why does it take a half a billion sperm to make just one healthy baby? It takes a lot of sperm to make a healthy baby. The answer is because sperm don’t know how to ask for directions. But they are easy to study. And research has been done in India, in the United States, at the Cleveland Clinic, and around the world.

So many different studies have been done on sperm damage associated with mobile phone radiation that in the seventh edition of the textbook, “Biostatistics in Medicine,” Stanton Glantz concludes that the evidence linking mobile phone radiation to sperm damage is causal, meaning there clearly is a cause of damage to sperm from mobile phone radiation.

Now, we have a lot of uncertainties in this field. The truth is we have a lot of uncertainties. But not about sperm. There the evidence has become rather strong, and it’s become so clear that the Indian government has issued warnings about this, that clinics that deal with reproductive problems are routinely advising young men to get those phones out of their pockets, recognizing that this is a hidden hazard to healthy reproduction.

This is the data from the Cleveland Clinic showing that men who keep cell phones in their pockets the longest have the lowest sperm count. And again, there are many other studies with similar results.

So we can debate legitimately the question of brain cancer, and I would welcome an open and honest debate about that question. But when it comes to issues like this, there really is not much to debate. And it’s interesting that the research on this issue comes from people who are experts in male fertility who started to treat men at infertility clinics and noticed that this was a major contributor to their fertility problems.

Now, experimental studies have been done also in India to confirm this kind of damage, not just looking at prenatal exposure or early life exposure, but taking middle-aged rats, 70-day-old male rats, that’s middle age for a rat, and exposing them two hours a day for 45 days to a computer-generated mobile phone signal.

And those results show lower testosterone, which is a very important hormone for a male. Men and women both have testosterone. Men just need a lot more of it. And also increases of DNA damage as measured by certain enzymes. And the offspring had lower fertility. And this is just to show you, this is a normal testis. You see the boundaries, the cell wall. It looks very nice. And this is after microwave radiation exposure. So there are some pretty stunning images that have been generated in the basic biology literature when it comes to these kinds of effects.

Now, the breast. The breast is mostly fat. Contains a lot of fluid. Things that contain fat and fluid cook faster in the microwave oven. Now, a cell phone can’t cook anything. Mobile phones do not pop popcorn. That was a fraud. They don’t make any heat that we know of, otherwise they wouldn’t be permitted.

But they do go through things that contain fat and fluid. And we are now working with Environmental Health Trust with scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, scientists at formerly the president of the American Cancer Society of California, because we are seeing women who keep cell phones in their bras. Has anyone seen a woman put a cell phone in her bra? Hands up, please. Please tell them. You’ve heard now why they shouldn’t do that.

And here I want to show you our first case report from 2009. And we now have many more. This is a Chinese-American woman, a Chinese-American woman who used her cell phone four hours a day in her bra for ten years while she was driving. Now, when you drive with a phone on your body, the phone is smart. It’s going to go from one tower to another, and it’s going to say, “Here I am, where are you? Here I am.” And it’s going to be going to max power each time it moves from one cell tower to another.

And there it was right next to her chest. The tumors that developed developed right under the antenna of the phone. Unusual tumors. Well, you know, that’s a very good question. Does it apply to males who would put the phone in their breast pocket? We actually have cases now of men with unusual skin cancers or unusual growth where they’ve kept their phone in one place. And again, phones would not be past testing approval if they were to do that.

Male breast cancer is very rare, very, very rare. But we are seeing some reports of cases. And here, unfortunately, this is an MRI of a young woman, a very brave young woman named Tiffany France. When she was 21, she’s now 22, she developed metastatic breast cancer. And this is metastasis into her chest wall right here. And this outlined the phone.

And it was subcutaneous, so it was like right under the surface of the skin. It was not deep within the breast. Most breast cancer occurs in women over 50. It occurs in the upper outer quadrant. These tumors occur right under the antenna of the phone. And now we have 38 of them. Not a single one of them has a family history. None of them has inherited the defects that we know increase the risk of breast cancer.

They have multifocal tumors. That means they have more than one tumor, and the tumors are located under the antenna, sometimes just right in the center of the chest. So we’re collecting information because that’s what we do in science. But we want to, in the meantime, issue precautionary advice because that’s also what we do in public health when it comes to setting public policy.

PRENATAL IMPACTS

When it comes to further work on the prenatal impacts, my colleagues at Yale University have taken mice, exposed them to mobile phone radiation, and they have found significant effects on those mice’s behavior as adults.

Prenatally exposed mice have hyperactivity as adults. And these are some of the data. They have worse memory. They’re more hyperactive. They have more anxiety. But they don’t have much fear. It’s kind of interesting. And because of that, that is why we’ve developed the Baby Safe Project, working with colleagues at Yale University and around the world.

Now, how many of you had heard that in 2011, the World Health Organization had reviewed all of the evidence and decided that mobile phone radiation was a possible human carcinogen? How many people had heard that? Okay.

It’s interesting that that information isn’t more widely known, and we can explore the reasons for that perhaps at a later time. But the fact is, the group that reviewed this evidence for the World Health Organization looked at all the evidence at the time in 2011. And at that time, they said, it’s important to conduct additional research and it’s important to take pragmatic measures to reduce exposure.

Now, that’s why it’s wonderful that Telstra is giving this advice, but we are not conducting additional research. And in fact, the World Health Organization itself is no longer conducting a leading study on brain cancer and mobile phones. Environmental Health Trust, the organization that I head, published an article in 2013 saying that we think that mobile phone radiation is a probable human carcinogen.

And I want to show you briefly the reasons why we reached that conclusion. These are studies published since the World Health Organization IARC review in 2011. So these are newer studies.

Here, Hardell from Sweden and Serenat from France. And what these are showing you is that the relative risk of developing brain cancer with more than 1,640 hours of lifetime use of a phone is almost three times higher compared to people who did not use mobile phones. Now, I know this seems like very confusing. These numbers don’t make a lot of sense to many of you. But really, the way you get these numbers is it’s like waiting for the grass to grow.

You study people who have brain cancer and you compare them with people who don’t have brain cancer, but they’re otherwise similar. They’re your controls and you compare the people with brain cancer to those who don’t have the disease. And you ask, well, do you remember whether you talked on the phone? It’s not a very precise science. Actually, there’s a lot of problems with what are called exposure misclassification. It biases you toward the null hypothesis.

The reality is it’s a very poor way of doing research, but we don’t have an alternative at this point. And what we need to do is to get the cooperation of telecom industry to get billing records so we actually have real data instead of asking people to remember how much they use their phone. That’s something that, again, you might be able to do in Australia, but I can tell you we can’t do it in the United States, that’s for sure.

In France, they were able to do it a little bit better and they were able to get these data here. And interestingly, if people started to use phones regularly before age 20, as most of the world is doing now, there was four to eight times more brain cancer after they had passed 10 years.

So now, why is there no increase in brain cancer that we can find in the general population today? Because there is not. And after all, if mobile phones really are important, why don’t we have an epidemic today?

Well, let me tell you why. First of all, brain cancer takes a long time to develop. How do we know that? We know that because when the bombs fell at the end of World War II, there was no increase in brain cancer in the survivors who had been studied. No increase at all. Until 40 years had passed. It took 40 years for an increase in brain cancer to show up in that highly exposed population.

Now, think about this. Today, the number of people using cell phones today and using them heavily today is very different than it was even five years ago, even three years ago. Now you’re being encouraged to have unlimited talk and text, right? You didn’t have unlimited talk and text five years ago or 10 years ago. So the uses and the users of phones are changing radically.

In fact, most epidemiologic studies find no increased risk of brain cancer from mobile phone radiation. They don’t. Until 10 years of heavy use. And by the way, the way they define a cell phone user in these studies, I’m not making this up, is somebody who makes one call a week for six months. Yes. Yes. One call a week for six months. That was the definition in these studies, which by the way, don’t find any increase. All right?

I’m not saying this to say that they did a bad job. I’m saying that we are challenged here with how do you do a study of something that’s rapidly changing while you’re studying it. The technology has changed. The way people have used it has changed. We never anticipated having infants and toddlers in cribs using these things. Nobody ever anticipated that.

There’s never been any modeling of the brain until we did this right now. And when I first said to my colleagues, by the way, it took us four years to get this work done, and four years ago I said, let’s do that modeling. And they said, what are you talking about? Why would anybody want to model an infant or a three-year-old using a mobile phone?

I said, “You wait. Unfortunately.” And so now we have a market, because the adult market is saturated. Australia already has more phones than people. It does. And so the market expands to the infants and toddlers.

HONEY BEE

Now I want to share with you some of the work from my colleagues in India. Dr. Sharma is the Senior Deputy Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research. And this work, Malka, I think will be of great interest to you, because of the work on honeybees. We don’t just have to wait for brain cancer to take 40 years to come up with answers.

Honeybees have the advantage of being relatively easy to study, and there actually are established protocols for doing this. And I’m going to share with you some of these data, and they have been developed by colleagues from a number of countries. Honeybees have different characteristic dance patterns, and they have different jobs.

There’s the worker bees, and there’s the bees that make the honey, and there’s the bees that protect the queen. And I don’t know all the details, but here’s what I do know. If you try to study these under controlled conditions, you can take hives and put a mobile phone in some hives and a mobile phone in other hives that’s not on. And what you can find is that after exposing the honeybees to an operating mobile phone, the workers don’t come back to the hives.

Now, this ought to be of great concern, because agriculture depends on honeybees. I think you in Australia have a new business that’s developed, I know it in the United States, where people drive trucks around with hives in it to fertilize crops. Have you heard of this? They drive them around because the honeybees are disappearing.

Now, there are many different factors that affect honeybees. Climate is certainly one, pesticides are certainly another, but mobile phone radiation could be yet another, and we certainly need to find out if that is the case.

Ten minutes of mobile phone radiation daily for ten days, if worker bees did not return to test colonies. And this would be something that could easily be replicated. So now we have to deal with reality.

There are many inconsistent results. I’m not just skimming the cream here and showing you the positive ones. There are a lot of studies that find nothing at all. Nothing. Why? Well, first of all, sometimes they study different cell cultures. If you’re looking for adult cells, they may be much more robust than if you’re looking at neuronal stem cells, and that turns out to be the case.

Sometimes they’re using different exposures. If you’re looking at continuous wave versus digital pulse signals, if you’re looking at a square wave versus a sine wave. There’s also another fact we have to talk about, which is yet another reason why I’m glad that Australia is not America. Sponsored research, to put it politely, can induce publication bias.

Another way to say this is that where you stand on an issue depends on where you sit and who’s bought your chair. And there’s a tremendous amount of sponsored research by people who are hired to do studies to find no effect. And that’s plagued this field in a number of countries, including within the government itself. Including within the government itself.

So, I don’t know about the details here with ARPANSA, but I can tell you in the United States today, the gentleman who is directing the Federal Communications Commission, Tom Wheeler, was for 10 years the executive director of the Cell Phone Telecommunications Industry Association. And now he’s in charge of regulating those devices. So it’s challenging to have a neutral playing field under that circumstance.

One example, the U.S. Congress asked for a study of what needed to be done on mobile phone radiation in 1993, in 1998, in 2002, in 2012. That’s how many times they’ve asked for that study to be done. So each time a study is done, and each time the conclusion is reached, we need more research. We need more research.

Well, that’s my bread and butter. Of course we need more research. But if instead of funding the research, all you’re doing is calling for it, then it becomes a bit of a smokescreen. So that’s part of our challenge on this issue. It’s a lot easier to call for research than it is to carry it out. This research is hard to do. It’s not simple. There are real complexities to this field. Unfortunately, at least in the past, industry had a very clear strategy.

And in my book, Disconnect, I document and quote in the new afterword that in 1994, when industry first became aware that there were studies suggesting that mobile phone radiation could damage brain cells of rats, a memo was written to, quote, “war-game the science.” War-game the science. This issue is far too important to be gamed. It’s not a matter of war. It’s a matter of the future health of your children and grandchildren. And that’s why it’s really a special honor for me to be here today to talk with you about what could be done.

Here are some of the policy responses that have developed so far. There are right-to-know laws and policies. Labeling is spreading. Headsets must be provided with all phones in a number of countries. And I’ll get to those in a moment. There are changes in hardware and antenna design and software, operating systems that can be developed. And there are also changes to what we demand for proof. An evidentiary burden. Any lawyers here? Right.

So the evidentiary burden that’s being required for proof of harm is changing. Do you really want to have to prove that there’s a significant increased risk of brain cancer before taking steps to reduce exposures to prevent that harm from happening? That’s really the question. How much evidence do we need before taking precautionary steps? And that’s what brings me back to my days at the National Academy of Sciences when we seriously looked at the evidence on passive smoke and airplane travel.

We only finally took steps to act when it became clear that children of smokers were hospitalized more often. That was the evidence that we had to have. And I would suggest that at this point we should be able to do better as a civilization. We start with – we need standardized ways to evaluate things. There is no standardized metric. That’s something you could develop at this school in particular.

One of the other things that can be done, which our colleagues in India are doing, is to create cross-sectional surveys. In this room right now, you can divide this room up into people who are high, medium, and low cell phone users. Probably nobody who doesn’t have a phone or who will admit to it right now.

But if you did look at people cross-sectionally and you looked at their memory and their reaction time and their reproductive health, you would learn a lot from that. And they are doing that now in India, and we’ll talk some more about that in my conversations I’ll have with some of the faculty later on.

In the meantime, some schools are promoting wired school programs with shared banks of computers. And public educational efforts are really proceeding to let people know you shouldn’t have to find that information buried inside your phone. I mean, come on. That’s not fair. Parents, teachers, and health professionals should be informed, and they in turn can work with students to make sure people are using technology in as safe a way as possible.

Now here’s some of the other policies that have been developed. In France, there’s a ban on advertising to young children under age 12, by the way. All cell phones have to be sold with earpieces. There has to be labeling of the specific absorption rate on phones. And there’s got to be warnings. In India, they lowered their tower limits to one-tenth that of the international standards, and they have official guidelines for cell phone use, using headsets and speaker phones.

The Supreme Court in India has actually ordered a number of towers to be torn down. But it’s a very tough battle to have to fight. Rather than having to get a tower torn down, there ought to be citing rules and policies that make sense. And in many countries, there are no real sensible citing policies.

Israel, which is a country that has a lot of important issues to deal with right now, has a national institute on non-ionizing radiation. They say no Wi-Fi in kindergarten. They prefer wired over wireless in schools. All phones, again, are to come with headsets and safety. And no advertising with children.

In Belgium, the law has been implemented as of 2014. It was passed in 2013. No phones are to be designed or sold for children under the age of seven. Again, all handsets must be sold with headsets. And the sale to young children is specifically prohibited.

Canada has issued practical advice as well. And I don’t go into any more details here. These slides will become available on the website for the university. And we have much more detailed information I can share with you from our website as well. The Canadian Parliamentary Health Committee has urged that there be a recognition that this is a, quote, “serious, serious public health issue.” And we agree. And I testified before the Canadian Parliament on this issue, and I was pleased to see their report agree with that point.

Now, in the United States, a U.S. district court has recently ruled that even if there is a reasonable possibility that cell phone radiation is carcinogenic, the time for action in the public health and regulatory sectors is upon us. And I think that that is a very important idea that we should all be aware of.

Let’s not debate the kinds of evidence we have now about brain cancer. I agree that evidence can be debated. But we have enough evidence of damage, and we have these other countries have taken steps now. They can’t all be dismissed.

Berkeley, California, has unanimously passed the cell phone right-to-know law, called an ordinance, requiring notification that if you carry your phone in your pants or shirt pocket or tucked into a bra when the phone is on, you may exceed the federal guidelines for exposure to RF radiation. This is a website that has all of the fine print warnings, so far as we know them, available. Environmental Health Trust is working with others to share this information.

We hope you’ll share it with all of your friends and family. This is the Baby Safe Project that we have underway. And now, just so you understand that this is not a question of being anti-industry, here’s what industry is doing. Vodafone has to provide a report to the American government as part of their annual reporting to the Security and Exchange Commission. They must report on what are called risk factors and uncertainties. And they report that they face risks because they may have to pay people for health damages.

The last sentence there, “a change to this view that there’s no health problem could result in a major reduction in phone usage or major litigation.” That’s a risk. China Mobile, in their report to the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission, had to say, “we cannot be certain that future studies will not impute a link between electromagnetic fields and adverse health effects.” And because of that, it’s a potential risk as well.

AT&T says unfavorable litigation could result and require us to pay significant amounts of money. Well, speaking of money, would you give two cents? Would you pay two cents a month for every device you have, for every provider, for every manufacturer, in order to support the cross-disciplinary training program that is needed in bioelectromagnetics for engineers and physicians and computer scientists?

That’s what’s needed to identify the data gaps, the research and development needs, to monitor the populations, to see what is happening to our children today, to look at hearing and memory and sperm count. That’s what I think we need.

We need a major program to fund independent research and training. Because I learned this way, way after I went to all that schooling you mentioned at the beginning, and it’s not easy stuff to do. I hold my hat off to all of you electrical engineers. It’s complicated. But in the meantime, people have a right to know how you can minimize exposure and, again, I think this information is available on our website. It will be available on yours.

Remember, if you have to give a phone to a child, put it on airplane mode. And think about this. That microwave oven, it works because there’s a metal box around the microwave signal and the signal pings all over the place. Next time you get into an elevator or a train for any length of time, put your phone on airplane mode. Otherwise, that signal is going all over the place, magnifying and coming back. Keep the mobile phone away from you when it’s on and you are asleep.

Now, it takes a village to do a lot of things. These are some of the people whose materials I’ve used today with their permission, and I can’t read this list to you. But I want you to know that I feel really honored to be working with some of the most talented people in the world on this issue.

And they have given me permission to share these materials with you, and I leave you with this thought from Albert Einstein. “The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm, but because of those who look at it without doing anything.” Thank you.

RELATED PRODUCT Recommends:

(BOOK) Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Has Done to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family

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