Following the BioEM2015 meeting in Asilomar, California, I have written a brief report for the Pandora Foundation, who sponsored my travel and participation. Some parts of the report were already published on BRHP in blogs from the meeting but parts are new, unpublished, thoughts.
Report is available in both, English and German. In addition, Pandora Foundation has written own news commentary available in both, English and German. The report contains my opinions. The commentary, although based on my report, presents opinions of Pandora Foundation itself.
Leszczynski BioEM2015 Report in English
Leszczynski BioEM2015 Report in German (translation prepared by Pandora Foundation)
Pandora Foundation commentary on Leszczynski Report from BioEM2015 in English
Pandora Foundation commentary on Leszczynski Report from BioEM2015 in German
For relaxation from the scientific complexities – Splendor of the Yosemite
BRHP - Between a Rock and a Hard Place 
“There you will find clear evidence of a dose response relationship, with a discussion on why such relationships can be obscured. This is one of the strongest pieces of evidence we have that radio frequency fields from mobile phone use cause brain cancers (gliomas).” So says Anthony Miller, combining irony and over-interpretation in the same sentence.
There is no strong evidence of anything in the cited work – which can be summed up as “There is some evidence that very high users experienced excess risk of glioma, but that evidence is INCONCLUSIVE…”, or “Overall, NO INCREASED RISK of glioma or meningioma was observed with use of mobile phones. There were suggestions of an increased risk of glioma at the highest exposure levels, but biases and error prevent a causal interpretation. The possible effects of long-term heavy use of mobile phones require further investigation.”
If that really is the strongest evidence we have – we have nothing more than confirmation bias!
I cannot agree with all aspects of your take on the issue of potential adverse effects of RF exposure below regulatory limits. However, I fully agree that the metrics used for exposure assessment and dosimetry are lacking. While the issue of recall bias is often cited as one of the limitation of existing epidemiological studies, little acknowledgement has been made of the fact that exposure surrogates being used are very poor proxies for the actual agent under investigation.
Variable and unpredictable power output is a characteristic of today’s wireless handsets – as this parameter is automatically adjusted by the different base stations which the handset is associated with from time to time – based on the signal quality of the radio link. This, and the other technical features of wireless technology, means that a handset in talk mode, with a peak power output of 2 Watts, can actually have an average power output as low as 0.0000625 Watts; a dynamic range of 45 dB – a factor of 32,000! In addition, different personal use characteristics will further increase this variability. It should be obvious that certain conclusions cannot be built on a foundation of uncertain data.
Quoted from SCENIHR 2015 Opinion, page 12:
“An epidemiological study should ideally capture all major sources of exposure as a function of time during the relevant time period (considering latency) prior to occurrence of the outcome. The minimum requirement for exposure assessment for an epidemiological study to be informative is to include reasonably accurate individual exposure characterization over a relevant period of time capturing all major sources of exposure for the pertinent part of the body. Valid exposure assessment makes it possible to distinguish between sub-groups with contrasting exposure levels. As EMF exposure is ubiquitous, it is difficult to find an unexposed reference group, and instead, a quantitative contrast is chosen by comparing low versus high exposure levels.
In general, personal exposimetry is regarded as the gold standard for assessment of current short-term exposure, because spot measurements may not adequately reflect long-term exposure. For studies on health risks from EMF, depending on the investigated endpoint, the relevant time period for which exposure data would be needed is a sufficiently long period, such as several years preceding the diagnosis of cancer. As a rule, retrospective exposure assessment is more challenging and prone to errors than estimation of concurrent exposures. Estimates from study subjects are rarely a reliable source of information, due to potential errors in recall, particularly for case-control studies. More objective sources of information should be used wherever possible.”
Without a clear understanding of the dose received by individual study participants and, if ‘the poison is in the dose’ as we have long been taught, the legacy usage data collected in existing epidemiological studies is not informative; and cannot be relied upon for decision making.
I do not agree with the statement on page 10 of your report “This might be the main reason why none of the epidemiological or human volunteer studies was able to show any dose-dependent effect.” Please refer to Appendix 2 in the reprt “Brain tumour risk in relation to mobile telephone use: results of the INTERPHONE international case-control study – IJE, May 2010.” There you will find clear evidence of a dose response relationship, with a discussion on why such relationships can be obscured. This is one of the strongest pieces of evidence we have that radio frequency fields from mobile phone use cause brain cancers (gliomas).
Thank you!
Andrew Cutz
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