WASHINGTON-The mobile-phone industry, having decisively triumphed in health litigation, believes more than ever science is solidly in its corner as a result of a growing number of new studies that have been unable to replicate genetic damage and other biological effects from radiation observed in past research.
Indeed, the landscape has changed dramatically from only a few years ago when cancer and health-related lawsuits were flying. Some lawsuits are still around, lingering on life support. Others have been withdrawn.
No issue has ever meant more to the $80 billion cellular industry in its first two, spectacular decades. One only has to look at the devastating financial hit to businesses from asbestos litigation to appreciate the high-stakes of the wireless health issue.
The controversy has not totally disappeared.
Hungarian researchers last week announced new research suggesting sperm damage to men carrying mobile phones on their waists. Scientists who conducted the experiment cautioned that further studies are necessary to determine the validity of initial results.
A top European scientist largely dismissed the findings. “It is an observational as opposed to interventional study, which appears not to take into account the many potential confounding factors which could have skewed the results,” said Professor Hans Evers of the Netherlands’ Academic Hospital Maastricht and past chairman of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.
Meantime, the Dutch Health Council has called for the replication of a study by TNO-a major European research group-that caused a major stir across the Atlantic last year after linking human sickness symptoms to 3G base stations.
While noting the study is the first of its kind and suffers from statistical uncertainties, the Dutch Health Council also offered another explanation for why replication is warranted. “The results may have implications for public health because of the widespread exposure,” the health agency stated.
The Federal Communications Commission’s radiation exposure guidelines for mobile phones and base stations are again under attack in a federal appeals court here, though the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld wireless safety guidelines in 2001. Still, the debate over whether mobile-phone radiation can cause non-thermal biological effects remains alive in some quarters.
The turning point in the health controversy was Baltimore Federal Judge Catherine Blake’s dismissal of an $800 million brain-cancer lawsuit against Motorola Inc. in 2002 and her rejection of class-action product liability suits against the wireless industry five months later.
Blake’s phone-cancer decision, a huge legal victory that crippled science relied upon by plaintiffs’ lawyers, was upheld last year by the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The same court is expected to rule next year on an appeal of Blake’s wireless product liability decision.
The state of wireless health research was the focus of an FCC workshop last week and at the annual meeting of the Bioelectromagnetics Society here last month.
Joe Elder, a former Environmental Protection Agency scientist who works at Motorola’s research lab in Florida, said the weight of evidence from 1,300 peer-reviewed studies and more than a dozen reviews of the scientific literature indicate no association between mobile phones and cancer.
Elder said 35 long-term animal exposure studies have been completed-most finding no adverse biological effects from mobile-phone radiation-and 17 others are in progress. Government, university and industry scientists accord significant weight to animal studies.
“The results of these [animal] studies offer strong scientific challenge to reports to in vitro [laboratory cell culture] effects,” said Elder.
Research is being conducted in Europe and Asia, some directed by the World Health Organization and much of it underwritten by wireless carriers and vendors. Government health agencies in the United States and other countries say research indicates mobile phones are safe, but add that more studies are necessary to remove any doubt. In recent years, health activists in the U.S. have pushed for federal funding of government-sponsored RF health research. But in an odd twist, a $10 million research solicitation by the National Toxicology Program, a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services, has yet to attract any takers.
Elder said experiments that found biological damage from mobile-phone radiation have not been replicated, noting that inadvertent heating and other errors likely produced positive findings.
Indeed, when an industry-funded $25 million research project revealed harmful biological effects from mobile-phone radiation in experiments, critics suspected unintentional heating called “hot spots”-not RF energy-caused the formation of the micronuclei. Micronuclei is a biomarker for chromosome rearrangement, a risk factor associated with cancer and other diseases.
As a consequence, the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association and the Food and Drug Administration agreed to collaborate in follow-up research to determine whether the micronuclei findings were valid. To do so, they contracted again with scientists at North Carolina’s Integrated Laboratory Systems Inc. to replicate the experiment using petri dishes instead of test tubes.
While the repeat RF experiment largely failed to see micronuclei materialize in human lymphocytes as had been observed previously, Dr. Ray Tice-the lead scientist in the original and follow-up research-disproved skeptics who argued hot spots were likely the cause of positive findings in the first go-round and who called for the study to be replicated.
However, Tice, who initially discovered micronuclei in studies conducted under the auspices of Wireless Technology Research L.L.C., said the latest data does not necessarily prove micronuclei were caused by a non-thermal mechanism in the first experiment. He added that companion animal exposure studies overseas did not find micronuclei formation.
Government scientists downplayed the lack of explanation for finding micronuclei in the original studies.
“Our concern is whether RF is causing micronuclei. We did not find it,” said Abiy Desta, a scientist with FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. FDA has legal oversight over mobile-phone radiation.
At the same time, Desta conceded, “We do not know what caused micronuclei in the first set of studies.”
Epidemiologist George Carlo, who headed WTR and had a bitter falling out with the cellular trade group that financed his organization, called the new micronucleus study a manipulation-not a replication-of the original WTR work. Carlo argued there was solid, scientifically supported reasons for using test tubes instead of petri dishes. “This study is a step backwards,” said Carlo..
