Alarming lack of science behind European wireless tech health alert

As we reported yesterday, the Council of Europe has released a report that recommends that its member states treat the radiation used in wireless communication as a potential health hazard, one on par with cigarettes and genetically modified foods.  States are encouraged to take measures to limit exposure, such as encouraging a return to wired phone lines and banning the use of WiFi in schools. Those are pretty radical responses for what remains a purely hypothetical risk—how did the report end up being so extreme?

Fortunately, the report itself provides some hints as to how how its author came to his conclusions. In doing so, it provides a caution about how politicians can take ambiguous science and latch onto some evidence selectively, creating a severely biased perspective. Most worryingly, it shows how they can do their best to ensure that others end up adopting the same perspective.

Wireless technology and health risks

It's worth taking the time to do a quick recap of what we know about the potential health risks from wireless radiation. Many studies have looked at the possibility that the use of cellphones is associated with increased risk of cancer. However, almost all of them have significant methodological limitations, as they rely on things like self-reported usage patterns, which are often unreliable. In the end, the results have been mixed: some studies find an elevated risk, others don't, and all are looking at periods shorter than the typical incubation time for some types of tumors. They also rely on exposures that occurred years ago, when the pattern of use and the cellular technology being used were significantly different.

If the epidemiology is mixed, the biology isn't. There's no well-described mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation can induce long-term biological changes, although it can cause short-term heating of tissues. Given the absence of a mechanism and the ambiguous population studies, there is no clear evidence of a long-term health risk to cellular phones. WiFi hardware hasn't been tested to anywhere near the same extent.

There is far less ambiguity when it comes to short-term effects beyond heating of tissues. As we've noted previously, a variety of studies that we have covered in the past show that people who claim to be electrosensitive are incapable of determining whether there is an active wireless signal in their vicinity. These studies appear to be definitive, as they involve well-controlled experiments. That isn't to say that people aren't experiencing the symptoms they claim, simply that they are misattributing the cause.

That said, scientific ambiguity tends to breed controversy, especially when it involves public safety, and wireless health risks are no exception. Researchers in the field have reasonable disagreements about what each others' work has shown, but for wireless health risks, a whole cottage industry has sprung up, ranging from industry-sponsored advocacy to credentialed scientists who have produced one-sided and misleading claims of clear health dangers. 

The former is often relatively easy to identify. The latter, however, is often difficult to spot, because the people promoting their viewpoint often have no obvious reasons for doing so, and the information they promote often seems scientific. For example, the BioInitiative Report was prepared by people with some relevant experience, and cites peer-reviewed literature extensively. Nevertheless, a careful reading shows that many of these citations are misleading; in some examples, its authors focus on single results from a publication that comes to conclusions opposite to the one being claimed.

As a result, it's essential that anyone wading into the topic carefully evaluate all the evidence being presented.

An unfortunate example

The Council of Europe report is a prime example of what happens when someone forgoes that careful evaluation. For that, we can apparently thank a member of Luxembourg's Les Verts, one Jean Huss. As far as Huss is concerned, the data is clear: "non-ionising frequencies, be they sourced from extremely low frequencies, power lines, or certain high frequency waves used in the fields of radar, telecommunications and mobile telephony, appear to have more or less potentially harmful, non-thermal, biological effects on plants, insects and animals as well as the human body even when exposed to levels that are below the official threshold values."

How does he back up this and other claims? Huss apparently has accepted the Bioinitiative report as accurate, when even a cursory glance of the studies it references will show that they are misrepresented therein. He favors the work of a single French doctor who claims to have validated electrosensitivity, and makes no mention of the other studies that have failed to. He also considers Sweden's political decision to recognize electrosensitivity to be evidence that it exists. 

Finally, he accepts anecdotal reports of elevated birth defects in farm animals as a sign of wireless signals' potential to harm; whale strandings and bee colony collapse also get blamed on the wireless industries. Based on the report's description of the hearings that led to these conclusions, Huss was warned that much of this evidence was anecdotal. His response is to complain about the people who delivered these warnings.

Given this biased reading of the evidence and those delivering it, it's shouldn't be a surprise that the report claims that the health risks of wireless tech "has clear parallels with other current issues, such as the licensing of medication, chemicals, pesticides, heavy metals or genetically modified organisms."

But the problems go beyond the conclusions, as Huss has inserted language that suggests future deliberations include a bias towards the same conclusions. The report suggests that the CoE should "pay heed to and protect" what he terms the "early warning" scientists, which could make this sort of biased reading official policy.

Locking a bias in place

As noted in our earlier coverage, the report calls for a complete restructuring of the telecommunications industry, one that would shift it back to where wired connections dominate (the use of radar and short-range wireless tech would also be curtailed). But it also goes beyond regulatory changes; Huss would have European states use their education systems to promote his own flawed understanding.

The report suggests a variety of methods are used to make sure that the populace is convinced there are dangers to wireless technology. States are called on to "develop within different ministries (education, environment and health) targeted information campaigns aimed at teachers, parents, and children to alert them to the specific risks of early, ill-considered, and prolonged use of mobiles and other devices emitting microwaves." Separate campaigns will raise the awareness of "the risks of potentially harmful long-term biological effects on the environment and on human health, especially targeting children, teenagers and young people of reproductive age."

That's a rather tall order, especially since we really don't have a firm grasp of what those risks are.

Fortunately, we're not even at the point where any of this has even been adopted by the Council of Europe, much less any of its member states. Still, Huss is hardly the first to have latched on to ambiguous science and used it to promote an unsupported agenda; the phenomenon is hardly limited to Europe, either. Even if they never produce regulation, these sorts of reports can still cause problems, in that those who seek to promote the same agenda often promote them as evidence of the seriousness of their concerns.