WASHINGTON-A top wireless safety expert has taken umbrage at Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association President Thomas Wheeler’s call for speedier work on the development of a standard to measure mobile-phone radiation absorbed by the head.
“We know that the committee has already completed a great deal of the proposed standard. In order to finalize your work, we respectfully request that the committee hold meetings on a more frequent schedule and to establish a firm timetable that will ensure the subcommittee’s completion of the standard by the end of the calendar year or shortly thereafter,” stated Wheeler in a Sept. 21 letter to Howard Bassen, of the Food and Drug Administration.
Bassen, an engineer in the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, is chairman of an Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers subcommittee crafting a standard for measuring the level of mobile-phone radiation absorbed by the head. The measuring standard will aid handset makers in complying with federal guidelines for the specific absorption rate (SAR) of RF in the head, which today is set at is 1.6 watts per kilogram. The scientific discipline of measuring SAR is called dosimetry.
Wheeler’s letter came the day after RCR published a story about the possibility that the Federal Communications Commission is giving safety approval to millions of analog cellular phones that may exceed SAR limits.
The problem is there are different testing and computational models employed by firms to measure SAR, but no agreed-upon standard yet for certifying wireless handset safety.
Ron Petersen, who chairs the IEEE committee on wireless safety and oversees RF product safety at Lucent Technologies Inc., said Wheeler’s statements show a misunderstanding of the IEEE standards process and a lack of an appreciation for history.
“This committee meets more than any committee I’ve ever been on. We probably would have been further ahead if it wasn’t for that,” said Petersen, referring to CTIA’s decision to kill RF dosimetry funding several years ago.
In 1996, CTIA directed Dr. George Carlo-head of a five-year, $27 million mobile phone-cancer research program-to cancel two major contracts on dosimetry certification because the trade group believed dosimetry research by Wireless Technology Research L.L.C. would duplicate similar work performed elsewhere.
The episode pointed to a clear instance where CTIA intervened in a program-funded by wireless carriers and manufacturers-that was supposed to be independent.
“He [Wheeler] should have expected something like this to happen when CTIA is partly to blame for having stopped funding of us,” said Petersen, referring to the clamor over the uncompleted SAR measurement standard.
Petersen noted that IEEE subcommittee members working on the SAR standard are volunteers.
Competition for an FCC contract for an SAR measurement system also may be contributing to controversy in setting an SAR standard.
Some scientists and governmental officials here and overseas claim there is no imminent health risk from mobile phones, but say more research is needed to test the validity of positive findings in recent studies.
Meantime, the wireless industry claims the overwhelming body of science so far supports mobile phones as being safe to the nation’s 70 million subscribers.
Petersen said the SAR standard will not be completed this year.
FDA’s Bassen, for his part, said he is conferring with IEEE subcommittee members before responding to Wheeler’s letter.
On a related front, CTIA and the FDA are moving ahead with plans for post-WTR research that CTIA will underwrite. A group of scientists from the United States and abroad are meeting this week at FDA to map out a research agenda. CTIA is paying for travel and lodging expenses of visiting scientists.
The meeting has sparked controversy because officials from the FCC and federal agencies with health and safety oversight were neither notified of nor invited to the meeting at the FDA. At RCR press time, it appeared this meeting had been postponed.
Dr. Elizabeth Jacobson, deputy director of FDA’s Science Center for Devices and Radiological Health, told Wheeler in June that FDA wants to replicate WTR studies that were inconclusive.
“We have been talking and working collaboratively [with FDA] over the past few months. Now we’re working on details,” said Jo-Anne Basile, vice president of external affairs at CTIA.
Dr. Michael Repacholi, director of the World Health Organization’s electromagnetic fields research program, will be one of the participants at the two-day meeting at the FDA.
A few years ago, a Repacholi study in Australia found twice the rate of lymphoma in 100 mice exposed to mobile-phone radiation compared with a control group of 100 mice not exposed to RF radiation.
Basile, who will sit in as an observer on Tuesday and Wednesday at the FDA, declined to give details on the cost or structure of new industry-funded RF research. She said the objective is to take a global approach to RF research in the future.
While FDA is taking the lead in monitoring mobile-phone health effects research, a Senate bill would give future RF research responsibility and funding-$10 million in fiscal 2000-to the Department of Health and Human Services.
