Cell phone recall exposes grey area in Canada’s health policy

A noted expert on the impact of cell phone radiation on humans says that LG Electronics Canada’s recent recall of the LG 150 raises questions about how governments certify and enforce standards for radio frequency exposure. LG announced on January 27 that the LG 150 no longer complied with Industry Canada’s guidelines in RSS 102, which prompted the recall. “There is very strong evidence that the exposures at rates well below US and Canadian certification levels are increasing the risk of cancer, as well as other diseases,” David Carpenter, head of the Institute of Health and Environment at the State University of New York at Albany, tells Report on Wireless. Industry Canada is currently revising RSS-102, according to Annie Trépanier, a senior media relations advisor with the department. “We plan to publish in 2009. The revised RSS-102 will include additional measurement procedures to address the latest development in wireless technologies.” In Canada, the LG 150 recall exposed a grey area in terms of how we regulate and – perhaps just as important – talk about, cell phone safety. A recall usually means a product isn’t safe; this is certainly the case with toys and automobiles. But with cell phones the data are still murky. “To date, there is no convincing scientific evidence that radio frequency energy from cell phones can cause ill health in adults or children,” says Philippe Laroche, a media relations officer with Health Canada. Laroche adds that Health Canada's Safety Code 6 specifies limits in terms of specific absorption rate (SAR), which is a measure of the rate of absorption of radio frequency energy by the body. The limit for a cell phone user is a SAR of 1.6 watts per kilogram (1.6 W/kg), averaged over any one gram of tissue. The current method of measuring RF energy on humans is “totally inadequate,” Carpenter says. “These levels are literally based on reducing the risk of brain heating,” he notes. “The standards assume that there is no adverse effect if no significant heating is caused – and then a safety factor is put in. For its part, Health Canada says it is just following the research. “The limits specified in Safety Code 6 were established after Health Canada scientists reviewed the results of hundreds of studies over the past several decades on the biological effects of radiofrequency energy,” says Laroche. “There is, to date, no convincing evidence of adverse health effects from radiofrequency exposures below the limits specified in Safety Code 6.” But that may be about to change. More than nine years ago, a global initiative called The Interphone Study was kicked off. It was tasked with looking at rates of four cancers across 13 countries, and was supposed to bring some clarity to the debate, but the project has been mired in controversy. “The Interphone Study is a rat’s nest,” says Carpenter. “The scuttlebutt is that the investigators can’t agree amongst themselves.” The study is partly funded by the World Health Organization and partly by industry. Carpenter is of the opinion that research in North America has been stymied by industry influence, and that the WHO itself has been weak in this area. For example, months after leaving his job as the head of the electro-magnetic frequency (EMF) Project at the WHO in late 2006, Mike Repacholi became an industry consultant advising on strategies for avoiding strict EMF exposure standards. That said, no-one has yet suggested that the disagreements within the Interphone group are due to any conflicts of interest. And the debate may be more genteel than Carpenter suggests. Jack Siemiatycki, Canada Research Chair in Environmental Epidemiology and Population Health at the Université de Montréal, said in an e-mail exchange with Report on Wireless simply that “The data are still being analysed and discussed by the collaborators.” However, Devra Davis, head of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Environmental Oncology, has said that the preliminary evidence is “worrisome.”And last summer Ronald Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, said the Interphone data he had seen – which had not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal – was sufficient to warn faculty and staff to limit cell phone use. This data likely came from the pooled results from Britain and the Nordic countries that were made public by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a WHO agency. The IARC has reported that researchers found "a significantly increased risk" of the rare cancers glioma and acoustic neurinoma related to mobile phone use. People in the know are beginning to act with caution. The French government recently banned advertisements pitching cell phones to children, and prominent neurosurgeon Keith Black from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Vini Khurana, an associate professor of neurosurgery at the Australian National University, and even CNN’s famed Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon at Emory University Hospital, all now use earpieces to reduce exposure risk.

Cell phone recall exposes grey area in Canada’s health policy

News | February 27, 2009

Unlock all the Canadian telecom, broadcasting and digital media news you need.

FREE TRIAL

SUBSCRIBE

Inside The Wire Report

Information

Hill Times Publishing

Get in Touch With Us