Subject: NIEHS "spin" as reported in MicroWaveNews......
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 151132 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Roy L. Beavers" <rbeavers@llion.org>
To: emfguru@hotmail.com
--------------------------------------------------
Hi everybody:
I'm afraid that some of you may not follow up on Louis Slesin's
suggestion to go to his web-site and read his editorial about the
"slant" our government (NIEHS) is putting on the results of the
EMF RAPID working group report.
So, I have copied it in full below and I urge everyone to take some
time and read it carefully. Louis highlights the 'public be damned,
we've got another agenda' attitude of the NIEHS -- which I say has
been amply demonstrated throughout the RAPID process. He correctly
quotes the hand-picked chairman of the working group, who couldn't
wait for the press (or anybody else) to read the results for themselves...
He had to put in his two-cents worth (that's about what it was worth)
and provide his ***slanted*** interpretation to tell them what it meant.
[Some of you will remember ... I noted Gallo's transgression at the time.]
But, as sadly disappointed as I am about the "slant" NIEHS is trying to
communicate to the public, my real frustration is with a press corps
that is "swallowing" the government "line" without any independent
examination of the facts for themselves......
If that chairman, Dr Gallo, had said to the press...."p___ on this
so-called EMF risk," it could hardly have been said any plainer than
he said it in fact..... The difference would have been, though,
the (males) in that press corps would have reached for their zippers.....
(No comment about the females.... I don't want any charge of sexism
here....)
Some of you, in the press, are "out there" monitoring this EMF-L network.
I plead with you -- I dare you -- don't accept what the government (or
industry) is publishing on this matter...... Get the facts for
yourselves!!! There is a BIG story here. Some courageous (as well as
wise) WORKING level scientists have put their jobs and futures on the line
in order to "ring this alarm bell" for a public that has ***shamelessly***
been mislead about the true facts of EMF bio-activity and possible
health consequences for at least a decade.......
Cheerio.....Be sure you read Dr. Slesin's editorial below......
Roy Beavers (EMFguru)
rbeavers@llion.org..............http://www.feb.se/EMF-L/EMF-L.html
................................It is better to light a single candle ...
than to curse the darkness...............................................
MicroWave News
Special Report:
NIEHS Spins the News,
Downplays the Health Risks
It was the press release that gave the game away. Up to that point,
the NIEHS had run a remarkably open process. But when its working
group voted to list EMFs as possible human carcinogens, NIEHS managers
moved quickly to control the message the public would hear.
Dr. Michael Gallo, who chaired the Minneapolis working group meet-ing,
was picked to calm things down. "This report does not suggest the risk
is high. It is probably quite small," he said in the NIEHS press
re-lease. Gallo is a toxicologist and the director of an
NIEHS-sponsored Center of Excellence at the University of Medicine and
Dentistry of New Jersey in Piscataway.
The sound bite worked like a charm. It was the only direct quote
offered by the NIEHS and every reporter assigned to the story
dutifully reprinted it. A Divided NIH Panel Agrees Power Lines May
Pose Small Cancer Risk, ran the Boston Globe headline (June 25).
That Gallo was giving advice on EMFs was in itself surprising. He is
new to the EMF debate, as he often remarked over the ten days of
meetings. "I am agnostic" on this issue, he said.
Nor did Gallo learn much about risk during the working
sessions—because risk was never discussed in Minneapolis. The
panel was told to ignore risk and concentrate on the science.
(Translated into jargon, the assigned task was "hazard
identifica-tion," not "risk characterization." The idea is that you
must first identify what risks, if any, exist, before you can judge
their size.)
"We don’t care what the outcome is," Dr. Kenneth Olden, the
director of the NIEHS, instructed the working group on the opening
evening of the meeting. "We just want it to be based on good science."
Risk analysis would come later.
But, evidently, Gallo and NIEHS’ senior managers felt they had to
offer their risk assessment without the benefit of the formal risk
analysis that Dr. Christopher Portier is preparing for them.
Why was the NIEHS trying to downplay public concern over EMFs? It is
puzzling, especially given that the most likely result of the
panel’s decision would be to prompt more health research, which,
after all, is the NIEHS’ raison d’être. Why not accept the
recommendation of its panel and ask Congress to keep funding EMF
studies?
Part of the answer has to do with the current climate for
environmental research. The RAPID program is coming to an end, and
Congress is not in any rush to renew it. So any future EMF studies
would be at the expense of other NIEHS projects.
But there’s more than money involved. NIEHS managers long ago
decided that EMFs are not worth their attention. In the press release,
Gallo did recommend more "hypothesis-driven, focused research," but,
in a telling omission, there was no endorsement from the NIEHS. Not
from Dr. Gary Boorman, the head of the institute’s EMF studies;
not from Dr. George Lucier, the director of its Environmental
Toxicology Program, who flew in for the concluding sessions of the
meeting; nor from institute director Olden himself. The NIEHS does not
want to make any commitments to EMFs.
The NIEHS’ ambivalence over EMFs is not new. Three years ago,
when the institute’s long-term animal studies were just getting
under way, Boorman said on national public television that, in all
probability, it would soon be obvious that "there’s really
nothing there" (see MWN, J/A95).
Boorman’s comments were remarkable. Here was a government
scientist who had just committed some $10 million of NIEHS (not RAPID)
funds for a set of animal studies—and he thought there was little
evidence of any real risk. For Boorman, it appear-ed as if their real
value was to quell what he perceives to be the public’s
groundless fears.
As it turned out, the animal studies were not as clearly negative as
Boorman had predicted. Earlier this year, the National Toxicology
Program found that they showed an "equivocal" cancer risk in male rats
(see MWN, M/A98).
The $10 million animal data did not play a major role in the NIEHS
working group’s decision. The epidemiology was the dominant basis
for listing EMFs as possible carcinogens. It had to be: There are
simply too many high-quality childhood and worker studies to ignore.
It makes sense that studies of human beings in real EMF environments
should be given more weight than experiments on animals exposed to
idealized magnetic fields.
In the real world, people rarely encounter the type of EMFs to which
Boorman’s animals were exposed—pure 60 Hz sine waves. In
retrospect, it was probably a gross mistake to bet the whole $10
million on one artificial type of EMFs.
Which brings us back to the question of risk. How much of a threat do
EMFs really pose? Do they pose only a small health risk, as Gallo and
the NIEHS would have us all believe?
When asked to put his quote in context, Gallo explained that he was
comparing EMFs to AIDS and TB. But we did not need a
multimillion-dollar research project to tell us that EMFs are not the
cause of a global plague. No one has ever argued that.
The idea that EMFs pose a small risk (at worst) comes largely from
industry propaganda (see p.15). It has been repeated so many times
that it is now accepted as dogma.
Even those who should be more skeptical are buying into the low-risk
assumption. Jocelyn Kaiser’s report on the NIEHS meeting for
Science (July 3) included this sentence: "Experts are quick to point
out that any cancer risk from EMFs is slight." She treated the
statement as so self-evident that she did not even bother to name any
of the experts.
The risks may indeed turn out to be small, but, at this point, that is
still very much an assumption. No one will know the true dimensions of
the EMF problem until the active biological agent has been identified.
It could be high frequency transients, but that too is a guess.
We are all exposed to EMFs all the time. This means that
epidemiological studies give at best a minimal estimate of the real
risks, because it is impossible to find a truly unexposed group to
serve as controls. EMF studies may be the equivalent of comparing
two-pack-a-day smokers with those who smoke three packs a day.
As Dr. Raymond Neutra of the California Department of Health Services
pointed out at the BEMS conference this June, "EMF risks could be
large compared to lifetime theoretical risks for most regulated
chemicals." Neutra argued that, "If you are not willing to do EMF
research, you should not be doing any en-vironmental research."
Anyone who has grappled with the inexact science of estimat-ing risk
knows that the numbers are easily manipulated to fit a desired
objective—especially with agents like EMFs, for which there are
large holes in the data. When the NIEHS releases Por-tier’s risk
analysis, his assumptions should be examined closely. After all, his
superiors have already made clear how it should turn out: not much
risk, not much need for research.
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