Subject: (Fist) Bad news about good news......
Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 042623 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Roy L. Beavers" <rbeavers@llion.org>
To: emfguru <rbeavers@llion.org>
--------------------------------------------------
.......Yes, the whole world needs to read this one, Stewart.......
(It can be found at: www.electric-words.com.....)
Roy Beavers (EMFguru)
rbeavers@llion.org................
...It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness...
.................PEOPLE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN PROFITS...............
Bad news about good news
Crossroads
by STEWART FIST
The Australian
20apr99
THERE'S a very pertinent old British press nostrum that begins:
"There's no cause to bribe or twist
When public relations isn't clearly separated from reporting it's not
a matter of bribery anyway; the dividing line between news and
propaganda becomes blurred. In fact, the sub-title of this column
should be: "Why buy Internet stock for millions when you can buy a
press agency for peanuts?"
Newspapers around the world have been carrying a good-news story this
week that has made the cell phone industry break out the champagne.
The story was reported in one Australian paper under the headline: The
Good News on Mobile Phones. The lead paragraph says: "Mobile phones
are unlikely to cause cancer, damage the brain or cause memory loss.
The findings are a relief for the half a billion phone users
worldwide."
The Australian on the same day (April 9) headlined its version under
the banner, Think Fast: Mobiles Ring a Bell. "Contrary to fears that
mobile telephones cause memory loss or even cancer," it announced
breathlessly, "new research shows that they do not damage memory and
have an unexpected effect; faster brain reactions."
What triggered this rush of electronic exuberance is a study by Dr
Alan Preece at Bristol University, which showed that cell phones
against the head had no effect on simple memory tasks but appeared to
improve reaction times by 4 per cent. I've had a full copy of the
report for some time, but considered it too inconsequential to bother
writing about.
The subjects were given computer-based memory and reaction tasks over
a total exposure time of about 25 minutes – equivalent to one
long phone call. Preece experimented on two groups of 18 university
students and they generally showed slightly improved responses in the
hit-the-button test. This is about the level of improvement people get
from coffee.
But look at the global newspaper reporting! It all follows a
predictable pattern.
First they announce that this is good news, when clearly it is not.
Good news would be that cell phones had no effect at all on brain
functions. In fact, I find evidence of possible direct influences on
the neurones of my grey matter seriously disturbing. The cell phone
industry has been telling us for years that no such direct action is
possible.
The possible stimulation of response times also should be viewed with
alarm, given the well-known stimulatory effects of low-levels of
arsenic and digitalis. These also kill you with high doses, and we
have no idea what happens with regular low doses of digitalis taken
over a lifetime. I, for one, am not inclined to find out.
Thirdly, they announce that this research has established cell phone
safety. I've now seen dozens of newspaper and magazine reports (most
notably, New Scientist and the UK Independent) that all make the same
claim. The statements generally say the Preece study, in some
undefined way, proves that cell phones are unlikely to cause cancer.
It does no such thing. Preece wasn't even looking at cancer causation
or promotion. His whole study was carried out on a couple of dozen
students in a few days, so these no-cancer claims are simply
ridiculous and demonstrate the profound ignorance of whoever wrote
them.
I'm not going to get into a biological discussion here, but I am
interested in the pattern of reporting. Many of these newspaper
articles were rewrites of a New Scientist piece circulated by the
press agencies. Unfortunately, New Scientist believes it is a White
Knight crusading against the proliferation of junk science, and it has
a disturbing habit of rewriting submitted copy to make it conform to
the house ideology.
The original article (and many of the rewrites) managed to interweave
news about the Preece report with another study of nematode worms
conducted at the University of Nottingham by Dr de Pomerai, which
"found that larvae exposed to microwaves grew more but wriggled less,
leading scientists to conclude that the emissions were speeding up
cell division".
In the original New Scientist article the next paragraph says: "The
researchers now intend to examine mammalian cells to see if they
divide more rapidly when exposed to microwaves – a finding that
would raise fears about cancer."
This is entirely justified, since cancer is just another name for
sped-up cell division. But what intrigues me is how the hell did AAP
and other journalists managed to interpret this statement as proving
that mobile phones are unlikely to cause cancer?
New Scientist hosed down public panic by reporting de Pomerai as
saying: "As a proportion of life span, exposing a nematode worm to
microwaves overnight is like exposing a human continuously for an
entire decade."
This is not true – cells are cells – but apparently it never
occurred to the New Scientist editors that humans might use cell
phones for an entire decade. But I do agree that there's no need to
panic. By God, however, there's an urgent need for further research,
and certainly no further excuse for the media peddling spurious claims
of proven safety.
This isn't just an isolated example of reporters' stupidity, or of the
systematic worldwide distribution of misleading information about the
status of cell phone and power line research. I've got a file full of
fallacious information circulated around the world by the press
agencies. Let me quote another published by newspapers around the
world in May 1997.
Reuters headlined this: "Mobiles Safe, Study Finds, But They Do Heat
Brain." It began: "A Finnish study partly funded by the
telecommunications industry has found mobile phones pose no health
threat to phone users, although they do transmit heat to people's
brains, researchers said Thursday.
"The study by four Finnish institutes examined the effect of radio
frequencies used by mobile phones on the brains of 19 people and found
no health hazards. The results are so consistent that the tests are
completely sufficient, Maila Hietanen, researcher at the state-funded
Occupational Health Institute told a news conference."
I contacted Dr Maila Hietanen to ask how a Nokia-funded study on 19
university students could be completely sufficient to prove cell
phones were safe. It transpired that she had only checked for
brain-waves changes (using an EEG) when a cell phone was switched on
in the near vicinity.
This was only one of half a dozen similar brain-waves studies done
around the world, and about half claim to detect slight radio
frequency effects – which the Preece study tends to confirm.
Hietanen was genuinely embarrassed that misinterpretations of her work
had been circulated globally.
Power lines are also a parallel and related concern here. Within a
month of the Finnish EEG study, another "good news" story was
circulated by the press agencies, supposedly proving that power lines
were safe. This epidemiological research was done by Martha Linet for
the US National Cancer Institute.
Linet created a list of 634 children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia
(ALL) and matched them to a similar number of kids without the
disease. She and her staff then systematically measured the magnetic
fields in all the homes to see if there was a statistical relationship
between high magnetic levels and the disease.
This was one of about 20 similar statistical studies done in the past
decade, mainly in Scandinavia and the US, and the vast majority have
reported a slight but significant link between EMF levels and the
disease. However, the wire stories declared the Linet study to be the
definitive one, ignoring all others – and they claimed she had
proved once and for all that power lines were safe. The New England
Journal of Medicine then took up the cry and called for governments so
stop funding power line health research – a rare event, indeed.
When Linet's published report reached the scientists, however, it took
about 10 minutes to find holes in the methodology. Linet had
arbitrarily applied a cut-off point of 0.2 microTesla on the magnetic
field levels, and decided that any children exposed at higher levels
were statistically insignificant.
Normally in this kind of research, a cut-off of 0.3T is applied, and
when Linet's dismissed statistics were added back into the findings,
it transpired that the NCI study confirmed the conclusion reached by
most of the other studies.
In fact, the evidence supporting this position is now so compelling
that the US government's National Institute of Health (NIH) spent a
million dollars in 1997, both on research and on funding a working
group (called the NIEHS Working Group) to report on the matter.
The 29 scientists and engineers came to the conclusion that power line
exposures should be classified as a Group 2B carcinogen. In the
language of cancer research, this classification groups low-level
magnetic fields along with DDT as "a possible cause of human cancers".
How was that reported around the world, I hear you ask?
Quite simply, it wasn't.
Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.feb.se/EMF-L/EMF-L.html