• 26 MAY 10
    • 0

    #1262: Comments on the Interphone Study

    Comment from Stan Hartman, originally to the CHEEMF list:

    There were serious, dedicated researchers who contributed to the Interphone Study, just as there are serious, dedicated people working for the EPA, FCC, FDA, and other agencies (even the Minerals Management Service), despite those agencies’ ineptness in really protecting the public, but Interphone turned out to be a mess anyway, obviously.

    Maybe I’m missing something, but if a camel is a horse designed by a committee (though Bedouins might take issue with that), isn’t the Interphone Study epidemiology designed by a similar committee (unless the Bedouins in this case are the wireless industry)? Putting aside its ridiculous definition of a “regular cell phone user” – which might have been valid 15 or 20 years ago – and granting the difficulty of finding a control group these days, its disregarding of cordless phones (not to mention wi-fi, etc.) is like doing a study on the health effects of smoking filtered cigarettes using a control group of people who don’t smoke, unless they smoke only non-filtered cigarettes.

    The results of such a study would be worrisome if it were merely inconclusive, instead of finding no correlation with cancer at all (putting aside all the other health effects), but it seems to me that with such design flaws the fact that it found any correlation points to the need to label such products at least probable carcinogens – again disregarding all the other health effects. That children are being allowed to use them is the equivalent of letting them keep cigarettes in their mouths all day, which even parents who are smokers wouldn’t allow, and wouldn’t have even back in the 50’s.

    This is obviously an education problem, and if the Interphone Study could be presented to the public in the proper light, in the light of what it actually means, maybe the alarm we’re trying to raise would finally get the attention of those in position to act accordingly and responsibly to protect public health. When properly understood, the Interphone Study seems to be enough in itself to justify such alarm – we don’t need another 10 years to correct its design and do it right.

    Stan Hartman
    Boulder, CO

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