"The truth about mobile phone and wireless radiation" -- Dr Devra Davis

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, my name is Even Marel, I am the Dean of Engineering here at the University of Melbourne. It is a real pleasure to welcome you to the last deans' conference of the year. Today's lecture is sponsored by the entire faculty of science, faculty of medicine. and the engineering faculty due to its theme, let me begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which the event takes place, which is the land of the common people, and we pay respect to their elders, their past families and present, so thank you. for attending tonight and given the topic, can I just remind everyone that it might be best if you turn off your

mobile

phone

while you're at this conference, you can turn it back on afterwards, that's right?

I would also like to remind people that tonight we are going to be video recording and so when you ask questions, we will automatically record it and we will take your question as well as a pre-presentation consent form with the video and audio recording . Let me introduce you to Dr. Davra Davis, who probably doesn't need legal authorization. introduction, but Dr. D Davis is a visiting professor of medicine at the Hebrew University Hadasa School of Medicine and also in Turkey at the Onus Mayas University. She is an expert who studies electromagnetic

radiation

from your

mobile

phone

s and

wireless

transmission devices.

Currently, she was the founding director of the center. of environmental oncology, which was the first center of its kind in the world and was established at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and he was looking at environmental factors that contribute to cancer. In 2007, she founded a nonprofit Environmental Health Fund to provide basic research and education. on the environmental impact on health risks, she was appointed by President Clinton to the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board in the United States from 94 to 99 there was an independent executive branch of the government that investigated all effects of accidents chemicals and how to prevent and mitigate them, she was also a senior advisor to the assistant secretary of health at the United States Department of Health and Human Services and, as such, has appointed many prominent United States officials.

United Nations World Bank, European environmental agency, Panamericana. Health Organization and the World Bank has a Bachelor's degree in Psychology a master's degree in sociology has a doctorate in science from the University of Chicago and a master's degree in Public Health in epidemiology from John Hopkins University many decrees He also has more than 200 publications and she has been published in Ford and the Journal of American Medical Associations, which are some of the leading journals in the field of medical research, and of course she has publications in Scientific American and the New York Times D Davis. I am very glad to hear the

truth

s about cell phones and

wireless

radiation

, all from you, thank you very much Dean Maral.

It is an honor for me to be here. It is a privilege to see so many of you. I must say that I am delighted to be at this great University that has a tradition of open and democratic discussion and I hope to have a frank and complete conversation as we say in the diplomatic world because the issue that I am going to talk to you about is that there is not a single

truth

of Of course, truth is a relative term at one time the truth was that the world was flat. What we talk about truth in science, of course, is always relative, but there are now more than six billion cell phones in the world.

Today, 8 billion wireless transmission devices. It is predicted that 50 billion will form the Internet of Things and we have to recognize that we do not know much about the environmental and public health effects of this form of radiation. You have briefly mentioned something about my career. I won't do it. I went over this in great detail, but I would say probably the most important thing I did, and I see a lot of people in this room aren't even old enough to remember, but a long time ago there used to be smoke on airplanes. People could smoke tobacco on airplanes, and I, as a young scientist, served on the committee that reviewed the data and recommended against smoking on airplanes.

You may be surprised to know that it was even a scientific question at the time, but it was and when I look at what we know now about cell phone radiation I see some very interesting similarities because a lot of questions were raised about the safety of tobacco on airplanes and In fact, they were legitimate questions, things we didn't know there. Without a doubt, there are many important questions that need to be asked about cell phone radiation today, but the reality is that we are not asking those questions and, with the exception of a few researchers here and elsewhere, they are being asked.

There is little new research in this field, so it is exciting to be here because Australia has been a leader in research in the field of electrical engineering and its applications to medicine, doing some of the most interesting work in the world and funded by institutions around the world. the world, including the US Department of Defense and me. I've worked at some of the biggest scientific institutions in the world, so when I first thought there might be something wrong with cell phones, I actually had three phones at the time. Now I have two and they all have to downsize a little bit and I didn't think there was a problem and I thought if there was a problem I would know about it because of course I knew everything about what was important in science.

Well, I was wrong. I liked the fact that I could call people or send messages. they message them and expect a response at all hours of the day and I found it a bit funny at first and when someone told me there might be a problem with this with our health I was like oh don't be ridiculous if there was a problem I would know well I was wrong and what I now know is that information is routinely sent to people to provide them with security information. I'm going to ask you to help me by looking at how many Many of you have an iPhone now, I'm assuming you didn't turn them all off, so those of you who have an iPhone, could you nod and raise your hand again?

I would like you to share it with your colleagues so go to your phone settings please take a moment and nod when you are good and ready to share go to phone settings you got there now go to settings , go to About, sorry, you have to go. First to General, there's a bug here, you have to go to General, all right, under General, under Settings, then go to About, which is at the top. You got there, Yeah, okay, now you have to scroll down to something you don't normally do. see called Legal, you have to Legal, now click on RF Exposure, now you can read it later, but it basically tells you that you should know that you cannot hold the phone directly next to your body without exceeding the tested exposure guidelines and by right, I know how to find it on the iPhone.

I'm just learning the Android system, but all smartphones come with information that basically says: don't put your phone in your pocket or you'll overdo it. the exposure guidelines tested now, how many of you knew that before today? Well, this is a very well-informed audience compared to others. I want to thank Telstra because they are now giving people this information and by the way they are one of the first telcos in the world to do this so I think it's good that they are sending this message. How many of you have seen it? How many of you have actually looked at what it said?

Well, this is what it says. what it says and like most of you I find messages like this annoying, but the reality is that Teler tells you to use a hands-free device to keep your cell phone away from your head and body to reduce exposure cell phone, so that's a good thing. but on the other hand I think we all need to do more to provide people with information so they have knowledge about how to reduce exposure and I'm going to explain to you why we need to reduce exposure, let's go back almost 20 years. Years ago, when standards for mobile phones were first established, it was believed that the only thing you had to worry about was avoiding heat, which was the only effect you had to worry about, so they used the head of a very big person. a 220 PB man who was in the top 998th percentile of military recruits in 1989 in the United States and they set the standards to avoid warming up that guy's brain after a six-minute phone call, now there are probably one or two people in this room with a head that size, but the rest of you, like most of the world, have relatively smaller heads and bodies and this standard, which is very off base, does not take into account the fact that people of the size of these two bright young people here in the front row are using these devices today without thinking that they may be exposed to levels of radiation that have not been evaluated for safety in young developing brains now the electromatic spectrum this is information from AR Panza in reality goes all the way from the invisible to the visible ionizing radiation gamma rays be of the same frequency since the cell phone the mobile phone the mobile phone and the microwave oven use a very similar frequency the difference between them is the power the power of the microwave oven is 1000 watts and of course that is the power that can heat a cup of water in maybe 60 seconds the microwave oven the mobile phone the cordless phone the Wi-Fi monitor the baby monitor all use the same frequency they differ in power they also differ because mobile phones and Wi-Fi devices Fi emit pulsed microwave radiation it is the pulse, not the power that appears to be biologically more important the pulse that is IR IC and irregular for thousands of minutes a month for dozens of hours a week throughout life.

That irregular pulsed signal may be much more important from a biological point of view and, in fact, continuous wave signals have many of the therapeutic effects that are applied in medicine today - this visualization by my colleague at the University of Athens shows the variation in frequency in the amplitude pulse. All of these variables influence the properties that the signal has and how it can affect a biological system. This is just to show you what happens on a 4C mobile phone call, this is the power density, the power density stated here and of course a phone is on hold, it's not doing too much but 900 times a minute He looks for a sign and tells the tower where they are. you here I am where are you here I am it's smart that's how it's supposed to do now when the phone rings the worst time to put a phone right next to your head is when you answer and say hello because it's smart and it's going to maximum power, they are programmed to do that maximum power, now it will go to maximum power, you are going to listen and then it will go up and down and up and down and again it is that variation, it is the Delta, it is the Cumulative integrative dose under the curve during a lifetime of exposure that appears to be biologically important.

Now the exhibition is something curious. There is a fairly distributed article by Ken Foster and CK Cho that says that an adult's exposure and a child's exposure is identical and therefore there is no real difference in how radiation might affect them. Well, let me explain something to you by showing my daughter and granddaughter. My granddaughter is a red-haired girl with very light skin and blue eyes. Her skin is very sensitive. My daughter is. For darker hair like me, if they have sunscreen on, they will still receive a different dose of UV light even if they have the same exposure because the exposure may be uniform but the amount they will absorb differs because the properties of the skin are the properties of the Eye, the thinness of the skin and a number of other variables, and those same things are relevant when it comes to thinking about cell phone radiation, now in the Middle Ages, when the standards were developed.

Two dimensional models showed that children and smaller adults could absorb more radiation than larger adults and this was scale modeling which has now been superseded by Om Gandhi in 1996, interestingly and that's why I'm really delighted to be here. Dean, when he did this work in 1996, was working with support. from Motorola and the Department of Defense and after publishing this they lost all their funding, which is why I was very happy when you told me that Australia is not the United States because I think you have the opportunity to do something here in this great country. We have a tradition of independence in science and in this country that unfortunately we don't have on this issue in the United States, so Professor Gandhi who I'm collaborating with now updated his work from 2002 hereshowing them that here they see a smaller adult head. the amount of exposure is quite similar, but because the head is smaller, it will absorb proportionally more.

Recently we have been working with colleagues from Porto algra with the Environmental Health Trust and we have developed three-dimensional models with anatomical models using MRI to create the models with 1 mm voxal and what we have done is show the difference in the radiation dose in heads of different ages and sizes AG and I'll just show you one example here coming from our colleagues at the Swiss National Institute of Technology. who have produced some of the world's most brilliant work in this field and have shown here, of course, that there will be greater exposure and absorption in a younger head than in an older head.

This is another element of your Target website. dose of tissue for the baby by using a system called virtualfamily, is there anyone here who has worked on virtual family? It's a really powerful and very sophisticated system that's used today to set standards for medical devices and surgical procedures, but it's not used for mobile phone standards. It seems strange to me and I want to show you an example of some of the work we are doing now that I am posting here for the first time and this is a modeled microwave radiation dose from a six year old child with higher levels in the frontal and temporal eyes. and cheek and look at this here now yellow, white and red are the hottest, and if you look closely you will see that it goes towards the eye, the nose, do it again so you can see it and now it goes towards the brain stem. that just shows them that there will be some exposure in that area of ​​a young head, it doesn't tell them that there are any biological effects at this time.

The next slide will show you something that might be of interest to students and teachers here. and that has to do with exposure to the reproductive organs, we call them gonads. I think you say testicles and bone marrow and look here at the radiation reaching the groin area and that's just from having a modeled cell phone in your pocket. and this again is based on a normalized sar with a dipole antenna, I believe, and there are many different variables that you can alter when creating this type of simulation, the number of antennas, whether it's GSM CDMA, whether it's only one operating simultaneously. antenna or more than one, but we believe that this is the type of work that needs to be done and that this institution could be in a position to do it.

My colleagues from Brazil would be happy to share with you the model we have. done to date to generate this, but based on this work and other studies that have been carried out around the world, the American magazine Consumer Reports recently recommended that no one keep a phone in their pocket, no one and, in fact, if phones If they tried their pockets, they would. exceeds tested exposure guidelines, which is why Telra has recently issued such advice. Now, when it comes to pregnancy, we are working with Yale University and over 100 doctors and experts in the United States and around the world who are pregnancy specialists. and we've been modeling the exposure of the head in late pregnancy and in late pregnancy when, of course, the head, as any woman here knows, is right on the surface, if you're lucky, it's on the surface and not looking up.

The spine can then get the most exposure because of course the skin is completely permeable to this radiation exposure and that is why we have developed the Baby Safe project with colleagues at Yale to advise pregnant women to protect their abdomen from radiation from cell phones, as well as from iPads to which I should add iPads and other devices are called tablets because they belong on tables, they are tested 20 cm away from that big type that I showed you before, a 20 cm distance is not approved for being held on the laps of young children, although millions of children now have them in schools because people involved in educational technology and those involved in public health research do not talk to each other just because If they did so they would understand that you are giving children a two-way microwave radiation device and If you must give them such a device for learning purposes, put it in airplane mode so that it does not send or receive signals as it would otherwise. .

Now this is a new model that we have developed with colleagues in Brazil and that we can share with you. how we have done it: first we start with the MRI and create the model with 1mm voils and it takes quite a bit of work to create this and this is what it looks like after a period of six minutes which is really not like that. As bad as it may seem because you see that the red area only partially goes through the adult's eye, the one we're really worried about is the little child's eye and this is a three-year-old brain that I modeled and you see that at the end of that six-minute call , the peak of yellow and red radiation is reaching almost both eyes and again, this is one call and it is not going to kill anyone, it may not cause any biological effect whatsoever for one call, two calls or three calls, but the question It's what is the cumulative impact of this type of exposure, how do we evaluate it, how do we study it, the problem we face is that right now we are in the middle of an experiment with my grandchildren and your children and we have no one to compare them with, no.

We have a control group in science, when you are given a medication, it is usually studied where some people get the medication and some people don't. They do not receive the drug and are called controls and then it is seen if those who received the drug are healthier than those who did not receive it and when the results are obtained it can be concluded if there is a difference between the exposed group and the control group. that your medication has worked well when it comes to cell phone radiation, we have lost our ability to have a true control group, even now with young children, more than half of young children today have access to these devices and I read this morning at the age at which about 133% of 2-year-olds can order their own apps.

I mean, I can't. I find it hard to imagine how a parent would give a 2 year old a device that would allow them to sort their own app, so where are they? us regarding research on babies, toddlers and young children and pregnancy Well, there is hardly any research going on, so again I am delighted to be here to talk to you about what might develop, believe it or not , this is the worst. It is not a joke. In fact, I've talked to grandmothers. I am one of them. My grandchildren didn't have a potty. I promise you that your father sometimes acts like he did.

Nowadays, many people take devices to the bathroom all the time, but there are actually little kids who don't go to the bathroom without their iPad, does anyone know someone like that? Any child, yes, it's that amazing and no one even thinks about this and what it could mean for radiation exposure and a parenting magazine called the iPad the best babysitter. I mean, if you need an iPad as a babysitter, you should reconsider having kids. I get it, I understand giving cranky kids something to distract them on a long car ride, but please put it on airplane mode, don't think you're doing anything good. for your child, if you hand him a device that is a two-way microwave radio, now I want to show you something that you may find hard to believe, but of course anyone who has been around babies lately knows that this is what they do with anything you give them that's how they learn things that they put in their mouths, but this is something that has to be observed to be believed.

NATO may be familiar to some of you, and NATO has supported radar research for years. Radar, of course, gave rise to the microwave. oven, how many of you know that? Well, the first microwave oven was called a radar range. The guys discovered they could cook things with radar and thought it was cool. In fact, they discovered it because when the guys were standing on the deck and it was cold at night, they would warm up in front of the radar and if they had chocolate in their pocket, it would melt, so they decided to find out what would happen if they sent the radar to things like sausages and corn, and soon that gave rise to the radar range, but women didn't like the idea of ​​cooking with radar.

The kids thought it was cool, so they revived the microwave name. It sounded delicate and tastier and today a microwave oven is a staple throughout the experimental world. Radar studies have been supported by NATO for years and one of the laboratories they have supported is that of Professor nzen Sahan and her colleagues, and the Environmental Health Trust convened an international conference with their laboratory partners and the Ministry of Health of Turkey in 2011. And I want to briefly show you some of the work that was developed in that laboratory. This shows them the cellular damage that occurred in animals that were prenatally exposed to cell phone radiation that was produced by a computer simulating cell phone exposure under controlled conditions.

So since you can't really get rats to make phone calls you have to model the exposure and what they did was they measured these are your controls that you compare things to and these were the prenats exposed just 15 minutes a day for seven days no there is a lot of exposure, but these are small animals and they grow in three weeks, they reproduce and what they were able to study were changes in liver melanalide, which is a measure of peroxidation, it is a measure of damage to the liver, so these animals basically suffered significant liver damage if they had been exposed prenatally compared to controls.

Now another group in Turkey has looked at prenatal effects on the brain and the test and, you know, in many countries, this is a very important point. research that has been done here and they looked at counting the number of cells in certain areas of the brain, the hippocampus, which is a critically important part of the brain and as I see, there are a lot of non-experts here and let me explain. that your hippocampus is very important for things like memory, balance and things like that, so studying the effects on the hippocampus in animals is a good way to anticipate the effects that might develop on intelligence and other things, and they looked at rats newborns after being exposed prenatally and compared those who were exposed with those who were not exposed and looked at their brain cells, the number of cells, their shape, etc. with established methods to test this and this paper was published in Brain Research, which is a relatively high impact journal and what they showed was that prenatally exposed newborns basically have fewer cells in the hippocampus.

Here are the exposed ones that are missing some cells and here are the controls that they are compared to and you can see here that these cells are, there are more here. more spread out and they actually did another memory test now how do you test memory in an animal you don't ask them to complete the crossword puzzle you test memory in an animal with well established learning protocols you teach them to run a maze and they get a food reward and you see how long it takes them to do that and what they did is a radial arm maze, they trained these starving animals to get a food reward correctly and after they did that, then they saw how long it took them to learn this if They had been exposed prenatally to cell phone radiation and what they found was that the newborns who had been exposed took three times as long to find their way out of an experimental maze and made twice as many errors and this again. is a statistically valid method for assessing learning, now closer to home, so to speak, between the brain and the test.

The studies have been carried out here in Australia, in Newcastle, by a colleague who is now the chancellor of the university and these studies have been carried out taking sperm. of healthy men and a test tube is exposed to cell phone radiation and a test tube is not exposed to cell phone radiation and then the results are evaluated and this is a measure of vitality we measure how well the sperm swim this is a measure of motility motility this is a measure of mitochondrial DNA damage, they have three times more damage to their DNA if they have been exposed to cell phone radiation compared to controls and now the problem is why is it They need 500 million sperm to produce just one healthy baby, it takes a lot of sperm to have a healthy baby, the answer is because sperm don't know how to ask for directions, but they are easy to study and this research has been done in India, in the At the Cleveland Clinic and around the world, there have been so many different studies on sperm damage associated with cell phone radiation that the seventh edition of the textbook Biostatistics and Medicine Stanton Glide concludes that the evidence that links theRadiation from mobile phones with damage to sperm is causal, which means that there is clearly a cause of damage to sperm from radiation from mobile phones.

Now it is us, we have many uncertainties in this field. The truth is that we have many uncertainties, but not about sperm. The evidence has become quite strong and has become very clear. that the Indian government has issued warnings about this that clinics dealing with reproductive problems routinely advise young men to take those phones out of their pockets recognizing that this is a hidden danger to healthy reproduction this is the data from the Cleveland Clinic which show that men who keep their cell phones in their pockets the longest have the lowest sperm count and, again, there are many other studies with similar results, so we can legitimately debate the issue of brain cancer and I would welcome a debate open and honest about that issue, but when it comes to topics like this there really isn't much to debate and it's interesting that the research on this topic comes from male fertility experts who started treating men in infertility clinics and noticed that this was a major contributor to her fertility problems now.

There have also been experimental studies done in India to confirm this type of damage, not just looking at prenatal exposure or early life exposure, but taking middle-aged rats, 70-day-old male rats, which is middle-aged. for a rat, and exposing them two hours a day. day for 45 days to a computer generated mobile phone signal and those results show lower levels of testosterone which is a very important hormone for a man, both men and women have testosterone, men just need a lot more and also an increase in DNA damage measured by certain enzymes and spring had lower fertility and this is just to show you, uh, this is a normal tesus, you see the limits, the cell wall, it looks very good and this is after exposure to microwave radiation, so it's nice, there are some pretty impressive images that have been generated in the basic biology literature when it comes to these types of effects now the breast the breast is mostly fat contains a lot of liquid things that contain liquid flattened cook faster in the microwave oven now a cell phone can't cook anything okay cell phones don't make popcorn that was a scam they don't produce any heat that we know of otherwise they wouldn't be allowed but they do pass for things that contain fat and liquid and now we're working at the Environmental Health Trust with scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, uh. scientists uh former president of the American Cancer Society of California because we're seeing women who keep cell phones in their bras.

Has anyone seen a woman put a cell phone in her bra with her hands up please tell them she already heard why she shouldn't do that and here I want to show you our first case report from 2009 and now we have many more. This was a Chinese-American woman a Chinese-American woman who used her cell phone four hours a day in her bra for 10 years while she was driving now and you drive with a phone on your body the phone is smart it will go off a tower to another and will say Here I am, where are you?

Here I am, and it will go to the maximum. energy every time you move from one cell tower to another and there it was right next to his chest and the tumors that developed developed right under the phone antenna, unusual tumors, well, you know, that's a very good question. , does it apply to men to put their phone in their chest pocket, in fact we now have cases of men with unusual skin cancers or unusual growths who kept their phone in one place and again, if they were test phones, They would not pass the tests if they did.

Let's do that, male breast cancer is very rare, very, very, very rare, but we are seeing some case reports and here, unfortunately, this is an MRI of a young, very brave woman, named Tiffany France, when she was 21 years old, now 22, developed metastases. breast cancer, this is metastases to the chest wall right here and this outlined the phone and it was subcutaneous so it was just below the surface of the skin, it was not deep in the breast, most breast cancer occurs in women over 50 years of age. it occurs in the upper outer quadrant these tumors appeared just below the telephone antenna and now we have 38 of them none of them have a family history none of them have inherited the defects that we know increase the risk of breast cancer Well, they have multifocal tumors , which means they have more than one tumor and the tumors are located under the antenna, sometimes right in the center of the chest, so we are collecting information because that is what we do in science, but we want to do it in the meantime. issue precautionary advice because that is also what we do in public health when it comes to establishing public policies when it comes to continuing to work on prenatal impacts.

My colleagues at Yale University took mice that exposed them to cell phone radiation and found significant effects on the behavior of those mice as adults. OK, prenatally exposed mice have hyperactivity as adults and this is some of the data, They have a worse memory, they are more hyperactive, they have more anxiety, but they are not very afraid, it is something interesting and because of that, we have developed the Baby Safe project working with colleagues from my University and from around the world. Now how many of you had heard that in 2011 the World Health Organization reviewed all the evidence and decided that cell phone radiation was a possible human carcinogen how many people had heard that okay it's interesting that that information is not better known and we can explore the reasons for this perhaps later, but the fact is that the group that reviewed this evidence for the World Health Organization looked for all the evidence at that time in 2011 and at that time they said that it is important to carry out additional research and it is important to take pragmatic steps to reduce exposure now, so it is wonderful that Teler is giving this advice, but we are not conducting additional research and in fact, the World Health Organization itself is no longer conducting a leading study on brain cancer and cell phones.

Enviromental health. The organization I run published an article in 2013 saying that we think cell phone radiation is a probable human carcinogen and I want to briefly show you the reasons why we came to that conclusion. These are studies published since the World Health Organization IC review in 2011, so these are newer studies, here Hardell from Sweden and Sarut from France, and what these show you is that the relative risk of developing cancer brain with more than 1640 hours of lifetime phone use is almost three times higher compared to people who did not use mobile phones. Now, I know, this seems very confusing.

These numbers don't make much sense. for many of you, but really the way they come up with these numbers is like waiting for grass to grow: they study people who have brain cancer and compare them to people who don't have brain cancer, but are otherwise similar . your controls and compare people with brain cancer with those who do not have the disease and ask well, do you remember if you spoke on the phone? It's not a very precise science, in fact, there are many problems with what is called exposure misclassification. biases you towards the null hypothesis, the reality is that it is a very poor way to do research, but we do not have an Alternate alternative at this time and what we must do is obtain the cooperation of the telecommunications industry to obtain billing records for So we can actually have real data instead of asking people to remember how much they use their phone.

That's something that again could be done in Australia, but I can tell you we can't do it in the United States, that's for sure in France. They were able to do a little better and they were able to get this data here and interestingly, if people started using phones regularly before the age of 20, like most of the world does now, there was four to eight times more brain cancer afterwards from reached uh, it had been 10 years, so now, why isn't there an increase in brain cancer that we can find today in the general population? Because there isn't, and after all, if cell phones really are important, why don't we have an epidemic today?

Well, let me. Tell you why brain cancer takes a long time to develop in the first place, how do we know that we know? Because when the bombs fell at the end of World War I there was no increase in brain cancer in the survivors who have been studied. not at all until 40 years passed, it took 40 years for an increase in brain cancer to appear in that highly exposed population. Now think about this today, the number of people using cell phones today and using them heavily today is very different than it was. Even five years ago, even three years ago, they now encourage you to have unlimited talk and text.

You didn't have unlimited talk and text 5 or 10 years ago, so the uses and users of phones are changing radically, in fact. Most epidemiological studies don't find an increased risk of brain cancer from cell phone radiation, they don't do so until after 10 years of heavy use, and certainly because of the way they define a phone user. cell phone in these studies, I'm not making this up, it's someone who makes one call a week for six months yes, that was the yes, one call a week for six months that was the definition in these studies which, by the way, they don't find no raise, so I'm not saying this to say that they did a bad job.

I'm saying here we have the challenge of how to do a study of something that is changing rapidly as you study it. Technology has changed the way people have used it. We never anticipated having babies. and little kids in cribs using this stuff, no one anticipated there's ever been any brain modeling until we did this now and, by the way, when I first told my colleagues, it took us four years to do this work and four years ago He said, let's do that modeling and they said what are you talking about, why would anyone want to model a baby or a three year old using a mobile phone.

I said, wait, unfortunately, and that's why we don't have Market now because the adult market is saturated Australia already has more phones than people, so the market expands to babies and toddlers. Now I want to share with you some of my colleague's work in India. Dr Sharma is the Senior Deputy Director General of the Indian Council. of medical research and this work Mala, I think it will be of great interest to you because of the work with bees. We don't have to wait for brain cancer to take 40 years to find answers. Bees have the advantage of being relatively easy to study and there are actually established protocols for doing this and I'm going to share with you some of this data and it has been developed by colleagues from several countries.

Bees have different characteristic dance patterns and they have different jobs, there are the worker bees and the ones that produce the honey and the ones that protect the queen and I don't know all the details, but this is what I do know, if you try to study them under conditions controlled, you can take hives. and put a mobile phone in some hives and a mobile phone in other hives that is not on and what you may find is that after exposing the bees to a working mobile phone the workers do not return to the hives, now this should be of great concern because agriculture depends on bees.

I think a new business has developed in Australia. I know in the United States, where people drive trucks with beehives to fertilize crops. Have you heard about this? They drive them because the bees are disappearing now there are many different factors that affect the bees the climate is certainly one pesticides is certainly another but cell phone radiation could be another and we certainly need to find out if that is the case 10 minutes of cell phone radiation a day for 10 days the worker bees did not return to the test colonies and this would be something that could be easily replicated, so now we have to deal with reality, there are many inconsistent results.

I'm not just skimming the cream and showing you the positives, there are a lot of studies that find nothing at all, nothing, why, first of all, sometimes they study different cell cultures, so if you look for adult cells, they can be much more robust that if you are looking for stem cellsneural networks and that turns out to be the case sometimes they use different exposures if you're looking at continuous wave signals versus digital pulse signals if you're looking at a square wave versus a sine wave there's also another fact that we have to talk about, which is yet another reason.

Why am I glad Australia is not US-sponsored research? This, to put it politely, can induce publication bias. Another way of saying this is that the stance you take on an issue depends on where you sit and who bought your chair, and there is a tremendous amount of research sponsored by people who are hired to do studies without finding any effects and that has plagued this field in several countries, even within the government itself, so I don't know the details here with our Panza, but I can tell you that today in the United States the gentleman who heads the Federal Communications Commission, Tom Wheeler, was for 10 years CEO of the Cell Phone Telecommunications Industry Association and is now in charge of regulating those devices, so it's a challenge to have a neutral position. playing field under that circumstance, an example, the US Congress asked for a study of what needed to be done about cell phone radiation in 1993 in 1998 in 2002 in 2012 that's how many times they asked that study was done, so every time a study is done and every time a conclusion is reached we need more research, we need more research, well, that's my bread and butter, of course, we need more research, but If instead of funding the research all you're doing is asking for it, then it becomes a kind of smokescreen, so that's part of our challenge on this topic.

It is much easier to request an investigation than to carry it out. This research is difficult to carry out. It's not simple. Unfortunately, this field has real complexities, at least in the world. In the past, the industry had a very clear strategy and in my book Unplug paper and I quote in the new one after 1994, when the industry first became aware that there were studies suggesting that radiation from mobile phones could damage the brain cells of rats, a memo was written to quote war hyen game science war game science this topic is too important to play it is not a question of war, it is a question of the future health of your children and grandchildren and that's why it's really a special honor for me to be here today to talk to you about what could be done here are some of the policy responses that have been developed so far there is right to know laws and policies labeling is spreading headsets must be provided with all phones in several countries and I will get For those at a time there are changes in hardware and antenna design and in the software operating systems that can be developed and there are also changes in what we require for testing the burden of proof.

Any lawyer here, so the evidentiary burden required to prove harm is This is changing do you really want to do it? I have to prove that there is a significantly increased risk of brain cancer before taking steps to reduce exposure and prevent that damage occurs. That's really the question: how much evidence do we need before taking precautionary measures? And that's what brings me back to my days at the National Academy of Sciences, when we seriously looked at the evidence on second-hand smoking and air travel, finally taking action when it became clear that children of smokers were being hospitalized; that was often the evidence that we had to have and I would suggest that at this point we should be able to do better as a civilization that we started with we need standardized ways of evaluating things there is no standardized metric that is something that you could develop this particular school a of the other things that can be done that our colleagues in What India is doing is creating cross-sectional surveys in this room right now.

You could divide this room between people who are high, medium and low level cell phone users. There's probably no one who doesn't have a phone or doesn't support one right now. but if you looked at people cross-sectionally and looked at their memory, their reaction time and their reproductive health, you would learn a lot from that and they're doing that now in India and we'll talk a little bit more about that in my In the meantime, I'll have conversations with Some faculty, some schools are promoting hard-wired school programs with shared computer banks, and public education efforts are really moving forward to let people know that they shouldn't have to find that information buried inside their phone, I mean, come on, That's not fair, parents, teachers and health professionals need to be informed and they in turn can work with students to make sure people are using technology as safely as possible.

Here are some of the other policies that have been developed. In France advertising aimed at children under 12 years of age is prohibited, by the way, all mobile phones must be sold with headphones, there must be labels with the specific absorption rate on the phones and there must be warnings, in India they have lowered their tower. The limits are one of the international standards and have official guidelines for the use of mobile phones with headsets and speakerphones. The Supreme Court of India has ordered several towers to be demolished, but it is a very tough battle to have to fight.

Instead of having to tear down a tower, there should be rules and sighting policies that make sense, and in many countries there are no really sensible sighting policies. Israel, which is a country that has many important problems to address right now, has a National Institute on non-ionizing radiation they say no Wi-Fi in kindergarten everyone prefers wired to wireless in schools again all phones should come with headphones and safety and advertising with children is not allowed in Belgium the law was implemented in 2014 and passed In 2013, phones will not be designed or sold for children under seven years of age.

All phones must be sold with headphones and sales to young children are specifically prohibited. Canada has also issued practical advice and I don't go into For more details here, these slides will be available on the University website and we have much more detailed information that I can share with you from our website. In addition, the Canadian parliamentary health committee has urged recognition that this is a serious appointment. serious public health problem and we agree and I testified before the Canadian Parliament on this issue and I was pleased to see that your report agrees with that point now in the United States a US District Court has recently ruled that even if There is a reasonable possibility that cell phone radiation is carcinogenic.

The time has come for action in the regulatory and public health sectors and I think it is a very important idea that we should all be aware of. Let's not debate the types of evidence we now have about brain cancer. I agree that the evidence can be debated, but we have enough evidence of harm and we have these other countries that have taken action now they can't all be dismissed Berkeley California unanimously passed the cell phone right to know law, they calls an ordinance requiring notification that carrying your phone in your pants or shirt pocket or tucked into a bra when the phone is on may exceed federal guidelines for exposure to RF radiation.

This is a website that has all warnings available in fine print to the best of our knowledge. Environmental Health Trust is working with others to share this information. We hope you share it with all your friends and family. This is the baby safety project that we have going on and now just so you understand it's not about being anti. -the industry this is what the industry is doing vodo has to provide a report to the US government as part of its annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission they must report on what are called risk factors and uncertainties and report that they face risks because they may have to pay people for health damages the last sentence there is a change in this view that no health problems could result in a major reduction in phone use or major litigation that is a risk China Mobile in their report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission that they had to say that we cannot be sure that future studies will not impute a link between electromagnetic fields and adverse health effects and, because of that, also It is a potential risk.

AT&T says unfavorable litigation could arise and require us to pay significant amounts of money, speaking of which. money, would you give two cents, would you pay two cents a month for every device you have, for every supplier, for every manufacturer, to support the interdisciplinary training program that is needed in bioelectromagnetics for engineers, doctors and computer scientists, that's what needs to identify data gaps that research and development needs to monitor populations to see what is happening to our children today to look at hearing, memory and sperm count, that's what I think we need , we need a major program to fund independent research and training because I learned this way after having attended all that education you mentioned at the beginning and it's not easy to do.

Hats off to all you electrical engineers, it's complicated, but in the meantime people have a right to know how it can be minimized. exhibition and again I think this information is available on our website, we will be available on yours remember if you have to give a child a phone, put it on airplane mode and think about this, that microwave oven works because it is a metal box around a microwave. The signal and the signal rings everywhere next time you enter an elevator or a train for an extended period of time, put your phone in airplane mode, otherwise the signal will go everywhere, magnifying and returning, keep the mobile phone away from you. when it's on and you're asleep, now it takes a village to do a lot of things.

These are some of the people whose materials I have used today with their permission and I can't read this list to you, but I want you to know. that I feel truly honored to work with some of the most talented people in the world on this topic and they have given me permission to share these materials with you and I leave you with this thought from Albert Einstein the world is not dangerous thanks to those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything so thank you thank you