The latest major scientific report to address the issue of cellular communications from cancer comes from England. There, the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme (“MTHR Programme”) released a report prepared for the Department of Health discussing its 11 years of research regarding whether cellular communications radio frequency emissions impact public health.
The report’s basic finding is that there was no link between cellular communications (from base stations or handsets) and adverse health effects in humans such as cancer.
The science underpinning the reported results is impressive. Some 60 peer-reviewed papers have been generated by this study funded through the MTHR Programme.
Quoting from the report:
Over a period of 11 years, the MTHR Programme has supported 31 individual research projects that between them have resulted in almost 60 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. All but one of the research projects is now complete, and the Department of Health has decided that this is an opportune time to bring research on mobile phones and health into its mainstream research portfolio.
. . .
In this report we discuss the work we supported to investigate whether maternal exposure to base station emissions during pregnancy could affect the risk of developing cancer in early childhood. A second project investigated the risk of leukaemia in relation to mobile phone use. Neither of the studies identified any association between exposure and an increased risk of developing cancer. These findings appear to be consistent with the results from other recent studies examining similar endpoints.
Of particular interest is that the MTHR Programme studied whether signal modulation produced any different study results compared to an unmodulated carrier wave (“CW”).
A key question in this area is whether the modulations applied to radio signals to enable them to carry voice and data communications can elicit specific effects that are different from those of the carrier frequency alone. We supported three projects to examine this issue in different ways, including one that tested whether a wide range of cells and tissues could demodulate the signal. None of the projects found any evidence that modulated signals produced different effects from the carrier frequency. When taken together with the findings from the provocation studies we supported, which also compared modulated signals with carrier frequencies, we believe that these results constitute a substantial body of evidence that modulation does not play a significant role in the interaction of radiofrequency fields with biological systems. This conclusion has extremely important implications and should facilitate the pooling of data from different studies and allow conclusions to be drawn with greater confidence.
Not surprisingly, the report concludes that further research should be conducted, and establishes five priority areas for that future research:
a Studies of long-term behavioral/neurological outcomes in children and/or adolescents in relation to mobile phone usage,
b provocation studies on children,
c provocation studies to identify neurobiological mechanisms underlying possible effect of mobile phone signals on brain function, including sleep and/or resting EEG,
d studies in suitable animal models of the effects of early-life and prenatal exposure on development and behaviour,
e studies in suitable animal models of effects on ageing and neurodegenerative diseases.
(The spelling above is that used in the report, which is written in British English.)
If you would like to read the MTHR 2012 report and/or the prior MTHR 2007 report, I’ll be happy to send them to you automatically via email when you fill the appropriate form(s) below.
PLEASE FILL OUT ONLY ONE FORM AT A TIME. Then you can fill out the other form if you’d like.
For a copy of the MTHR 2012 report, please fill in the form just below. The 2012 report will be emailed to you as soon as you press SEND.
If you would like a copy of the MTHR 2007 report, please fill in the information below. It will be emailed to you as soon as you press SEND.
-Jonathan
