- To the detail we go Archived Message
Posted by walter
on May 22, 2020, 2:42 am, in reply to "For clarity, the SA article was an opinion piece by Moskowitz himself"
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Time I got to some detail. My comments in square brackets. [Just before leaving the issue of that IARC classification of EMF (electro-magnetic fields) as possibly carcinogenic, I'll point out that the IARC were/are stalwart defenders of telecoms safety, and stonewall deniers of risk. This news of a partial recant (covering their backs due to long-mounting evidence of risk) was a cataclysmic event.] Grimes: On the strength of epidemiological evidence, cancer fears are dangerously misguided: While American cell-phone usage has grown from virtually zero in 1992 to virtually 100 percent by 2008, there has been no indication [hyperlink given to one study, see below] that glioma rates have increased proportionally in the same period—a nonrelationship replicated by numerous other studies [another hyperlink]. Of course, not all studies are created equal. In biomedical science in general, low-quality, poorly controlled studies are far more likely [hyperlinked] to see ostensible effects than high-quality investigations, and RF research is no different. Many of the studies Moskowitz linked to are of poor quality, and more tellingly, at least one he listed flatly contradict his dire assertions. [The first hyperlink in the above paragraph is from 2012 (a bit early to be finding diseases of small incidence and long latency due to something that took off in the late 90s) was to a study which didn't find gliomas had increased during the period of expanding cell-phone use: (https://colo.cancer.gov/news-events/press-releases/2012/GliomaCellPhoneUse). In fact the link is only to a press release, with no link to the study abstract and no information on the authors that might help journalists track down the detail for themselves. In particular, did the study only look at overall incidence rates or did it break down the incidence by risk factors. Is this an example of quality? Fast forward to the second hyperlink above, https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/163/6/512/87535 (2006). What - a study from 2006? He's really up with the latest. But brain tumours have a latency of at least 15 years! You wouldn't expect much to show up in that time period from ordinary mobile users by then. In fact the quoted study in this link - the hyperlink saying "a nonrelationship replicated by numerous other studies" - DID report a strongly elevated incidence of glioma brain tumours in the long term user group (more than ten years mobile use): "Among persons who had used cellular phones for 10 or more years, increased risk was found for glioma (odds ratio = 2.20, 95% CI: 0.94, 5.11)", https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/163/6/512/87535 So double the risk. But that isn't the main problem with his argument that "there has been no indication that glioma rates have increased proportionally in the same period" . The main problem is that gliomas have a very low incidence to begin with; to expect a proportional increase is not reasonable, because an increase in the most likely subgroups (like older people, as in the case of the lobes of the brain where the biggest increases in gliomas are) would likely be masked by statistical 'noise' from the other groups. This noise is due to 'small number' variation, and you have small data sets because the disease is rare. Of course, as the data set grows, the association if there should show up - eventually. Finally, there probably has been an increase in the gliomas, as found in a 2018 revised analysis of the brain tumour data: https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jeph/2018/7910754/, where the authors explain that " We ran analyses separately for each site (C71.0 to C71.9), for each main type of tumour, and for tumour grade (I to IV). It was immediately obvious that the most significant change was in the incidence of GBM in frontal and temporal lobes." The authors said that the increase in GBM had been masked by the overall fall in incidence of other types of brain tumour. This study was into the incidence of brain tumours, but the implication was obvious. The frontal and temporal lobes of the brain are "the two lobes that receive the greatest dose of microwave radiation when cell phones are used near the head during phone calls". https://smombiegate.org/trends-in-brain-tumor-incidence-outside-the-u-s/ When this 2018 study was reported, there was little doubt what was in the van as the cause: "Mobile phone cancer warning as malignant brain tumours double", https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/05/02/mobile-phone-cancer-warning-malignant-brain-tumours-double/ Ironically this 2006 study cited by Grimes is the German branch of the infamous Interphone study (which I think he'd be better keeping quiet about). I see he invokes this later on as an example of quality and an 'unequivocal' conclusion. But the hyperlink discussed above (the press release) highlights the same Interphone study as being one of two that "provided the primary evidence for IARC’s subsequent 2011 re-classification of microwave radiation produced by cell phones as a possible human carcinogen." The study ran for years over schedule because the researchers couldn't agree whether more brain tumours had been found or in what circumstances. Yes that's how 'unequivocal' it was! BTW this 'quality' study was notorious for classification of a mobile user as "regular" if they used a mobile phone at least once a week for at six months. Thereby practically guaranteeing to dilute any outcome to the point of invisibility. The third hyperlink in that paragraph is to generic tirade about biased research and didn't relate to his target here, though he misleadingly implies it does. In fact the opposite would be true - industry funded studies are far more likely to find a 'safety' outcome than independently funded studies. |