Dirty Tricks by Powerful Industries Suppress the Truth About EMR Health Risks—Telecommunications

by Heidi Stevenson

18 January 2010

The telecommunications and electricity production industries use Big Tobacco's techniques to suppress information about health damage from electromagnetic radiation (EMR) Suppression of information. Making false claims. Promises to do research. Stonewalling. Attacking the whistleblowers. There seem to be no limits to the games played to protect profits.

The stories of the two industries occur during the same timespan. The methods are much the same. Here's the tale of a man who stood up to the telecommunications industry to get out the truth about the dangers of EMR:

Communications Industry

The risks of mobile phone safety first came to the public's attention in 1993, when David Reynard sued over his wife's death from brain cancer. He provided films showing that the tumor was in the shape of the mobile phone's antenna. The suit was announced on the Larry King Show, resulting in a media frenzy. Telecommunications stock nosedived the next day.

The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) was on top of the issue. They issued lies...um, statements saying that mobile phones were safe and that there were thousands of studies to prove it. At that point, not a single mobile phone safety study had been done. The only studies were on microwave ovens.

Back then, the media wasn't the completely lazy lapdog it is now. They demanded that the studies be provided. When they proved not to exist, they reported on the lack of studies, TIA knew it had a problem on its hands.

Enter Dr. George Carlo

Dr. George Carlo first blew the whistle on risks inherent in mobile phones. From 1993-1999 he was director of the Wireless Technology Research (WTR) program, a study group of about 200 scientists paid by the telecommuncations industry as the result of congressional pressure. Tasked with assessing the risks of wireless technology, the results reported by Carlo documented potential risks to human health. The real shock, though, is that he actually said so.

Why was Dr. Carlo chosen to head WTR? He was then working for the FDA, doing research on silicone breast implants. The EPA should have been given oversight of the WTR program, but the telecommunications industry lobbied to have the FDA, known to be easy to manipulate on public health issues, handle it. The telecommunications industry is larger than the pharmaceutical industry. [Of course, we know how well the FDA regulates Big Pharma.]

Milt Bowling, in Health Action Magazine, explained why Carlo was chosen:

After all, he was a world recognized medical scientist, author and lawyer. His career spanned thirty years, with more than 150 medical, scientific and public policy publications in the areas of public health, workplace safety and consumer protection. He was well respected in Washington, having served on several government committees, worked with several government agencies, and was often sought by the news media to opine on issues related to public health and consumer safety. He was just the man to oversee the surveillance and conduct the studies. The industry expected that they had found the man who would give them the all-clear.⁽⁸⁾

As an epidemiologist, Carlo's skills can be applied to the health hazards of electromagnetic radiation (EMR), as well as breast implants. Because of the controversy around breast implants at that time, the FDA hoped to give an impression of having no bias. So the agency gave George Carlo free rein.

The first thing Carlo did was to produce study criteria to which all parties were required to agree. It included:

• Making research independent of the source of funding by putting money into a trust that the industry couldn't control.
• Requiring that all results be peer reviewed before being released.
• Requiring that the FDA to create an informal oversight group to assure the public that the industry wasn't paying for the results it wanted.
• Requiring that the media have access to everything they did.

Once agreement was reached, Carlo hired 200 research scientists. Systems were designed to study the effects of head-only exposure to mobile phone radiation. Human blood and lymph tissue were used to assess EMR effects. Rats were used to look for DNA and other genetic damage. Carlo stated

We also conducted four different epidemiological studies on groups of people who used cell phones, and we did clinical intervention studies. For example, studies of people with implanted cardiac pacemakers were instrumental in our making recommendations to prevent interference between cell phones and pacemakers. In all, we conducted more than fifty studies that were peer-reviewed and published in a number of medical and scientific journals.

Early on, the results of the study documented that mobile phones can interfere with pacemakers, but also that the problem could be resolved quite easily by keeping the phone far enough from the device. The communications industry wasn't happy with that. They were angry, and when Carlo indicated that he intended to publish findings in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997, the industry cut off all funding. After nine months of negotiation, the industry agreed to provide lowered funding.

The research documented several damning mobile phone health risks, including breaking DNA and finding micronuclei in blood, which is a marker for cancer.

In 1998, when study results were ready for dissemination to the public, TIA wanted control. They wanted to hand out information as they saw fit and withhold whatever they chose. It's not surprising, since the reports were not kind to mobile phones. ABC News did an exposé on the issue. Carlo says,

The industry played dirty. It actually hired people to put negative things about me and the other scientists who found problems on the internet, while it tried to distance itself from the program. Auditors were brought in to say we misspent money, but none of that ever held up. They tried every angle possible.

The pressure on Carlo was tremendous. Threats were made on his career. His former wife was contacted to figure out how best to put pressure on him. He learned through the grapevine that word was being spread around that he was unstable. Then, his house was burned down intentionally. To this day, though there's no doubt it was arson, the case has not been solved. On this event, Carlo is silent.

Since then, Carlo has mostly kept a low profile, though he has continued studying EMR. In 2007, he coauthored a paper published in the Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine that found a connection between autism and EMR. His career—that of a rising start—was eclipsed after the arson. That's the price paid for standing up to the corrupt mobile phone industry.

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