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

good evening ladies and gentlemen my name is Eva Maria I'm the Dean of engineering here at University of Melbourne it's real pleasure to welcome you here to the last deans lecture of the year today's lecture sponsored across the Faculty of science faculty of medicine and Faculty of engineering because of its topic let me first start with acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which the event is taking place that is the land of the ordinary people and we pay respect to their elders their families past and present so thank you for attending tonight and given the topic may I just remind everybody that may be better to switch off your mobile phone whilst we in this lecture you can switch it back on afterwards that's right I also like to remind people that tonight we are videotaping and so when you're asked questions you're automatically going to be recorded and will take your asking question as also a form of prevent presenting consent with being videotaped and audio taped let me just introduce dr. Deborah Davis who doesn't probably need an awful lot of introduction the dr. Deborah Davis is a visiting professor of medicine at the Hebrew University Hadassah medical school and also in Turkey at under Kuzma University she's an expert studying doctor magnetic radiation for mobile phones and wireless transmitting devices at present she was the founding director of the center for environmental oncology which was the first such Center in the world and was established University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and he was linking looking at the environmental factors that contribute to cancers in 2007 she founded a non-profit environmental health trust to provide basic research and education about environmental impact on health hazard she served as President Clinton's appointee on 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 the effects of chemical accidents and how to prevent and mitigate against them she was also senior advisor to the assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health and Human Services in the United States and as such has counseled many leading officials in the United States United Nations World Bank European environmental agency the pan-american Health Organization and the World Bank she holds a Bachelor of Science in psychology a Master of Arts in sociology she has a PhD in science from University of Chicago and she has a master of public health in epidemiology from the John Hopkins University a lot of degrees she has also smore than 200 publications and she's been published in Lancet and the Journal of American Medical Association's which are some of the top journals in the field of medical research and she of course has publications in Scientific American and the New York Times every day you're very pleased to listen to the truth about mobile phone and wireless radiation all thank you very much Dean mario's I'm honored to be here it's a privilege to see so many of you I must say I'm thrilled to be at this great university which has a tradition of open and democratic discussion and I look forward to having a frank and full conversation as we say in the diplomatic world because the issue I'm going to talk with you about is there isn't one truth of course truth is a relative term at one point the truth was the world was flat what we talk about truth in science of course it's always relative but there are now more than six billion cell phones in the world today eight billion wireless transmitting devices more than 50 billion are anticipated to form the Internet of Things and we have to recognize that we don't know a lot about the public health and environmental effects of this form of radiation you have briefly you've mentioned some of my career I won't go through this in any great detail but I would say to you that probably the most important thing I did and I see many people in this room aren't even old enough to remember it but long time ago used to have smoke on airplanes people could smoke tobacco on airplanes and I was involved as a young scientist in the committee that actually reviewed the data and recommended that there be no smoking on airplanes you may be shocked to hear that it was even a question for science at the time but it was and when I look at what we know now about mobile phone radiation I see some very interesting similarities because there were a lot of questions that were raised about the safety of tobacco on airplanes and they were in fact legitimate questions things we did not know there are a lot of important questions to be asked about mobile phone radiation today without any doubt but the reality is we're not asking those questions and with the exception of some researchers here and elsewhere very little new research is being done in this field so it's a thrill to be here because Australia has been a leader in research in the field of Electrical Engineering and it's applications to medicine doing some of the most exciting work in the world and funded by institutions around the world including the US Department of Defense and I've worked at some of the up institutions in the world in science and so when I first thought there could be something wrong with mobile phones I actually owned three phones at the time I owned two now and I everybody has to downsize a bit and I didn't believe there was a problem and I thought if there were a problem I would know about it because of course I knew all about was important in science well I was wrong I liked the fact that I could call people or actually send them messages and expect an answer at all hours of the day and found it kind of fun in the beginning and when somebody said to me there could be a problem with this with our health I said oh don't be ridiculous if there was a problem I'd know about it well I was wrong and what I now know is that information is being sent to people routinely to give them safety information I'm going to ask you to help me out here by looking at how many of you have an iPhone now I assume you didn't all turn them off so for those who have an iPhone would you not raise your hand again I'd like you to share with your colleagues so please go to the settings on your phone right please take a moment and nod when you've got there all right and be prepared to share alright go to settings on the phone got there all right now get to settings now go to about I'm sorry you have to go to general first there's a mistake here I have to go to general alright under general under settings then go to about which is at the top you got there about yes okay now you have to scroll all the way down to something you don't normally see called legal you have to legal all right now click on RF exposure now you can read it later but it's basically telling you that you need to know that you can not keep the phone directly next to your body without exceeding the as-tested exposure guidelines and by the way the iPhone does it I happen to know how to find it on the iPhone I'm just learning the Android system myself but all smartphones come with some information that basically says don't keep the phone in your pocket or you will exceed the as-tested exposure guidelines now how many of you knew that before today well this is very well informed audience relative to others I want to thank Telstra because they actually are now giving people this information and by the way they're one of the first telecom companies in the world to do this so I actually think it's a good thing they're sending this message how many of you have seen it how many of you have actually looked at what it's said well here's what it says this is what it says and like most of you I found messages like this annoying but the reality is Telstra is telling you to use a hands-free device to keep a mobile phone away from the head and body to reduce mobile phone exposure so that's a good thing but on the other hand I think that we all need to do better to give people information so that you have knowledge about how to reduce exposure and I'm going to explain to you why we need to reduce exposure go back to almost 20 years ago when standards for cell phones were first set up at that time it was believed that the only thing you had to worry about was avoiding heat that was the only effect you had to be concerned about and so they employed the head of a very large person a 220-pound male who was at the top 98 percentile of military recruits in 1989 the United States and they set the standards to avoid heating up that fellow's brain after a six-minute phone call now there's probably one or two people in this room with a head that size but the rest of you like most of the world have much smaller heads and relatively smaller bodies and this standard which is very much out of date doesn't take into account the fact that people the size of these two bright young people here in the front row are using these devices today with no thought that maybe they're getting exposed to levels of radiation that have not been evaluated for their safety in young developing brains now the Electra Matic Spectrum this is information from ARPANSA actually goes all the way from the invisible to the visible ionizing radiation gamma rays x-rays over here and light here this is from our pond so you will see here they say FM radio microwave oven radiant heat of course microwave oven actually happens to be of the same frequency as the cell phone the mobile phone a mobile phone and the microwave oven use a very similar frequency the difference between them is power the power of the microwave oven is a thousand watts and of course that's power that can heat up a cup of water in maybe 60 seconds the microwave oven the mobile phone the cordless phone the Wi-Fi monitor the baby monitor they all use the same frequency they differ in power they also differ because mobile phones and Wi-Fi devices emit pulsed microwave radiation it's the pulse not the power that appears to be biologically most important the pulse that is erratic and irregular like for thousands of minutes a month for dozens of hours a week over a lifetime that irregular pulsed signal may be much more biologically important and in fact the continuous wave signals have a lot of therapeutic effects as are being applied in medicine today this visualization from my colleague at the University of Athens shows you the variation in frequency in amplitude in pulse all of these variables influence the properties a signal have and how it can affect a biological system this is just to show you what happens in a four-second mobile phone call this is power density power density indicated here and of course a phone is on standby it's not doing too much but 900 times a minute it's looking to for a signal it says the tower where 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 for you to put a phone right next to your head is when you answer it and say hello because it's smart and it goes to max power they're programmed to do that max power now it's going to go to max power you're going to listen and then it will go up and down and up and down and again it's that variation it's the Delta it's the cumulative integrative dose under the curve over a lifetime exposure that looks to be biologically important now exposure is the kind of funny thing there's a rather widely distributed paper by Ken Foster and CK Cho that said that the exposure of an adult and the exposure of a child is identical and therefore there's no real difference in how the radiation might be affecting them well let me explain something by showing off my daughter and my granddaughter my granddaughter is a very light-skinned red hair blue-eyed child her skin is very sensitive my daughter is darker haired like I am if they have sunscreen on they still will get a different dose of ultraviolet light even though they have the same exposure because the exposure may be uniform but the amount they will absorb differs because the properties of the skin the property 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 way back in the dark ages when the standards were developed two dimensional modeling showed that children and smaller adults might absorb more radiation than larger adults and this was scalar modeling that has now been superseded done by ohm Gandhi in 1996 interestingly and this is why I'm really delighted to be here Dean when he did this work in 1996 he was working with support from Motorola and the Department of Defense and after he published this he lost all his funding that's why I'm really happy when you told me that Australia is not America because I think you have an opportunity to do something here in this great country you have a tradition of Independence in science and in this country that we do not have unfortunately on this issue in the United States so professor Gandhi with whom I'm collaborating now updated his work in 2002 here showing you that a smaller adult head here you see the amount of exposure is this is quite similar but because the head is smaller it will absorb proportionally more Mork recently we have been working with colleagues at Allegro with environmental health trust and we have developed three-dimensional modeling with anatomically based models using MRI to create the models with one millimetre voxels and what we have done is to show the difference in radiation dose in heads of different ages and sizes and I'll just show you one example here coming from our koalas at the Swiss National Institute of Technology the IT is which are have produced some of the most brilliant work in the world in this field and they have shown here of course that there is going to be greater exposure absorption into a younger head versus an older head this is another item from their website of target tissue dose for the infant with using a system called the virtual family is there anyone here who's worked on the virtual family right it's it's a really powerful and very sophisticated system that is used today to set standards for medical devices and surgical procedures but it's not used for mobile phone standards I find that odd and I want to show you an example of some of the work that we are doing now that I'm releasing here for the first time and this is a model microwave radiation dose of a six-year-old with greater levels to the frontal and temporal lobes eyes and cheek and watch this here now yellow white and red are the hottest alright and if you look carefully you will see it's going into the eye the nose do it again just so you'll get to see it and partly into the brainstem now that's just showing you that there's going to be some exposure into that area of a young head it doesn't tell you that there's any biological effect right now the next slide is going to show you something that might be of interest to students and faculty here and that has to do with exposure to the reproductive organs we call them the gonads I think you say the testicles and bone marrow and look here at the radiation as it gets into the groin area and that's just from having a mobile phone modeled into the pocket and this again is based on normalized SAR with a dipole antenna and there are many different variables you can alter in coming up with this kind of simulation right the number of antenna whether it's gsm cdma whether it's simultaneously operating only one antenna or more than one but we believe that this is the kind of work that needs to be done and that this institution might be in a position to do it and my colleagues from Brazil would be happy to share with you the modeling that we have done to date to generate this but based on this work and other studies that have been done around the world the United States magazine Consumer Reports recently recommended that nobody keep a phone in their pocket nobody and in fact if phones were tested in pockets they would exceed the as-tested exposure guidelines which is why telstra has recently issued that advice now when it comes to pregnancy we're working with Yale University and more than a hundred physicians and experts in the United States and around the world who are specialists in pregnancy and we have been modeling exposure to the head at the end of pregnancy and at the end of pregnancy when of course the head as any woman here knows is right at the surface if you're lucky it's at the surface and it's not facing the spine then you can get the greatest exposure because of course the skin is completely permeable to this radiation exposure and that's why we've developed the baby safe project with colleagues at Yale to advise pregnant women to protect their abdomens from mobile phone radiation as well as from iPads which I should add iPads and other devices are called tablets because they belong on tables they are tested 20 centimeters away from that big guy that I showed you before 20 centimeters away they are not approved to be held in the laps of little children although millions of kids are having them now in schools because the people involved in educational technology and those involved in public health research are not talking to one another because if they were they would understand that you're giving children a two-way microwave radiating device and if you must give them such a device for learning purposes put it on airplane mode so that it's not sending and receiving signals as it does otherwise now this is some new modeling again that we've developed with colleagues in Brazil and we can share with you how we've done it it's we first start out with the MRI and create the model with one millimetre voxels and this is quite a bit of work goes into creating this and here is what it looks like after a period of 6 minutes that's really not as bad as it might look because you see the red area only gets partway through the eye of the adult right the one that we're really concerned about is this one with the young child and this is a three year old brain that we modelled and you see that by the end of that six minute call the peak radiation yellow and red is is is getting all the way into almost both eyes and again this is one call and it's not going to kill anybody and may not cause any biological effect whatsoever for one call or two calls or three calls but the question is what's the cumulative impact of this kind of exposure how do we evaluate it how do we study the problem we face is that right now we're in the midst of an experiment on my grandchildren and your children and we don't have anybody to compare them with we don't have a control group in science when you are given a drug it's usually been studied where some people get the drug and some people don't get the drug and they're called the controls and then you see whether or not those who got the drug are healthier than those who did not and when you get results you can conclude if there is a difference between the exposed and the control group that your drug has worked well when it comes to mobile phone radiation we've lost our ability to have a true control group they even now with young children more than half of young children today have access to these devices and I read this morning in the age that something like 13% of children aged 2 can order their own apps I mean III can't I find it hard to imagine how a parent would give a child age to a device which was allowing them to order their own app so where are we with respect to research on infants toddlers and young children and pregnancy well there's almost no research underway which again is why I'm delighted to be here to talk with you about what could be developed believe it or not this is the I potty now it's not a joke I have actually talked to grandmothers I'm one of them my grandchildren did not have an iPod II I promise you their father sometimes acts like he did a lot of people today take devices into the bathroom all the time but there are actually young children who will not go to the potty without their iPad does anybody know anybody like that any kids yes is that amazing and nobody's even thinking about about this as what it might mean for for radiation exposure and parent magazine called the iPad the best babysitter I mean if you need an iPad for a babysitter you need to rethink having children I understand I understand giving cranky children something to distract them on a long car trip but please put it on airplane mode don't think that you're doing something good for your child if you hand them a device and it's a two-way microwave radio now I want to show you something that you may find hard to believe but of course anybody who's been around babies lately knows that this is what they do with anything you give them that's how they learn things they put them in their mouths but this is something that you have to watch to believe it NATO may be familiar to some of you and NATO for years has supported research on radar radar of course gave birth to the microwave oven how many of you know that okay the first microwave oven was called a radar range the guys figured out that they could cook things with radar and they thought it was pretty cool they actually discovered it because when guys would be standing on the deck and it was cold at night they would warm themselves in front of the radar and if they had chocolate in their pocket it would melt so that's how they decided to figure out what would happen if you beamed radar at things like hot dogs and corn and soon enough that gave birth to the radar range but women didn't like the idea of cooking with radar guys thought it was pretty cool so they'd reach in deled the name to microwave it sounded dainty and more palatable and nowadays a microwave oven is a staple around the world experimental studies have been supported by NATO on radar for years and one of the laboratories they've supported is that of Professor Nezzer and sahaan and her colleagues and environmental health trust convened an international conference with her laboratory partners and the Ministry of Health of Turkey in 2011 and I want to show you briefly some of the work that that developed from that laboratory this is showing you cellular damage that occurred in animals that were prenatally exposed to mobile phone radiation that was produced by a computer simulating the mobile phone exposure under controlled conditions right so because you can't really get rats to make phone calls you've got a model the exposure and what they did is they then they measured in these are your controls that you compare things with and these were the exposed prenatally exposed just 15 minutes a day for seven days not much exposure but these are small animals and they grow within three weeks they produce and what they were able to study was changes in liver Milland aldehyde which is a measure of peroxidation is the measure of damage to the liver right so these animals basically had significant damage to their liver if they had been exposed prenatally compared to controls now another group in Turkey has looked at prenatal effects on the brain and the testes and you know a lot of countries this is a very important 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 since I see there's a lot of non-expert here and let me just explain that your hippocampus is pretty important to things like memory balance things like that so studying effects on the hippocampus in animals is kind of a good way to anticipate effects that might develop on intelligence and and other things and he looked at newborn rats after they had been exposed prenatally and compared those who were exposed to those who were not exposed and they looked at their brain cells the number of cells shape etc with established methods for testing this and this article was published in brain research which is a relatively high impact Journal and what they showed was that prenatally exposed newborns have basically fewer cells in the hippocampus here's the exposed missings themselves and here are the controls which they're compared with and you can see here that these cells are there's more of them here they're more scattered and in fact they did another test of memory now how do you test memory in an atom you don't have them fill out the crossword puzzle you test memory and an animal with well-established protocols of learning you teach them to run a maze and 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 animals who were starving to get a food reward right and after they did that they then saw how long did it take them to learn this if they had been prenatally exposed to mobile phone radiation and what they found was that newborns that had been exposed took three times as long to find their way out of the experimental maze and made twice as many errors and this again it's a statistically valid method for evaluation learning now closer to home so to speak between the brain and the testers studies have been done here in Australia at Newcastle by a fellow who's now the pro Chancellor of the University and these studies have been done taking sperm from healthy men and one test tube gets exposed to cellphone radiation and one test tube is not exposed to mobile 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 mobility motility this is a measure of the mitochondrial DNA damage they have three times as much damage on their DNA if they have been exposed to mobile phone radiation as compared to controls and now the issue is why does it take a half a billion sperm to make just one healthy baby it takes a lot of sperm to make a healthy baby the answer is because sperm don't know how to ask for directions but they are easy to study and these research has been done in India in the United States at the Cleveland Clinic and around the world so many different studies have been done on sperm damage at OCA with mobile phone radiation that in the seventh edition of the textbook biostatistics in medicine Stanton glance concludes that the evidence linking mobile phone radiation to sperm damage is causal meaning there clearly is a cause of damage to sperm for mobile phone radiation now it's we have a lot of uncertainties in this field the truth is we have a lot of uncertainties but not about sperm there the evidence has become rather strong and it's become clear so clear that the Indian government has issued warnings about this that clinics that deal with reproductive problems are routinely advising young men to get those phones out of their pockets recognizing that this is a hidden hazard to healthy reproduction this is the data from the Cleveland Clinic showing that men who keep 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 debate legitimately the question of brain cancer and I would welcome an open and honest debate about that question but when it comes to issues like this there really is not much to debate and it's interesting that the research on this issue comes from people who are expert in male fertility who started to treat men at infertility clinics and noticed that this was a major contributor to their fertility problems now experimental studies have been done also in India to confirm this kind of damage not just looking at prenatal exposure or early early life exposure but taking middle aged rats 70 day old male rats that's middle age for rat and exposing them to hours a day for 45 days to a computer-generated mo phone signal and those results show lower testosterone which is a very important hormone for a male men and women both have testosterone men just need a lot more of it and also increases of DNA damage as measured by certain enzymes and the and the offspring had lower fertility and this is just to show you this is a normal test this you see the boundaries the cell wall looks very nice and this is after microwave radiation exposure so it's pretty it's there are some pretty stunning images that have been generated in the basic biology literature when it comes to these kinds of effects now the breast the breast is mostly fat contains a lot of fluid things that contain flat and fluid cook faster in the microwave oven now a cell phone can't cook anything right mobile phones do not pop popcorn that was a fraud they don't make any heat that we know of otherwise they wouldn't be permitted but they do go through things that contain fat and fluid and we are now working an environmental health trust with scientists at the University of California San Francisco scientists at formerly the president of the American Cancer Society of California because we are seeing women who keep cell phones in their bras has anyone seen a woman put a cell phone in her bra hands up please please tell them you've heard now why they shouldn't do that and here I want to show you our first case report from 2009 and we now have many more this was a chinese-american woman a Chinese American woman who used her cell phone for hours a day in her bra for 10 years while she was driving now and you drive with a with a phone on your body the phone is smart it's going to go from one tower to another and it's going to say Here I am where are you here I am and it's going to be going to max power each time it moves from one cell tower to another and there it was right next to her chest and the tumors that developed developed right under the antenna of the phone unusual tumors well you know that's a very good question does it apply to males who would put the phone in their breast pocket we actually have cases now of men with unusual skin cancers or unusual growth where they've kept their phone in one place and again if they were test phones would not be passed testing approval if they if they were to do that male breast cancer is very rare very very rare but we are seeing some reports of cases and here unfortunately this is a an MRI of a young woman very brave young woman named Tiffany France when she was 21 she's now 22 she developed metastatic breast cancer this is metastases into her chest wall right here and this is outlined the phone and it was subcutaneous so it's like right under the surface of the skin it was it was not deep within the breast most breast cancer occurs in women over 50 it occurs in the upper outer quadrant these tumors occurred right under the antennae of the phone and now we have 38 of them not a single one of them has a family history none of them has inherited the defects that we know increase the risk of breast cancer they have multifocal tumours that means they have more than one tumor and the tumors are located under the antennae sometimes just right in the center of the chest so we're collecting information because that's what we do in science but we want to in the meantime issue precautionary advice because that's also what we do in public health when it comes to setting public policy when it comes to further work on the prenatal impacts my colleagues at Yale University have taken mice exposed them to mobile phone radiation and they have found significant effects on those mices behavior as adults all right prenatally exposed mice have hyperactivity as adults and these are some of the data they have worse memory they're more hyperactive they have more anxiety but they don't have much fear it's kind of interesting and because of that that is why we've developed the baby safe project working with colleagues at Yale University and around the world now how many of you had heard that in 2011 the World Health Organization had reviewed all of the evidence and decided that mobile phone radiation was a possible human carcinogen how many people had heard that okay it's interesting that that information isn't more widely known and we can explore the reasons for that perhaps at a later time but the fact is the group that reviewed this evidence for the World Health Organization looked at all the evidence at the time in 2011 and at that time they said it's important to conduct additional research and it's important to take pragmatic measures to reduce exposure now that's why it's wonderful that Telstra 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 mobile phones environmental health trust the organization that I had published an article in 2013 saying that we think that mobile phone radiation is a probable human carcinogen and I want to show you briefly the reasons why we reach that conclusion these are studies published since the World Health Organization IRC review in 2011 so these are relative ease our newer studies here har Dell from sweden and sarah not from france and what these are showing you is that the relative risk of developing brain cancer with more than 16 hundred and forty hours of lifetime use of a phone is almost three times higher compared to people who did not use mobile phones now this I know this seems like very confusing these numbers don't make a lot of sense to many of you but really the way you get these numbers is it's like waiting for the grass to grow you study people who have brain cancer and you compare them with people who don't have brain cancer but they're otherwise similar they're your controls and you compare the people with brain cancer to those don't have the disease and you ask well do you remember whether you talked on the phone it's not a very precise science actually there's a lot of problems with what are called exposure miss classification it biases you toward the null hypothesis the reality is it's a very poor way of doing research but we don't have an alternative at this point and what we need to do is to get the cooperation of telecom industry to get billing records so we actually have real data instead of asking people to remember how much they use their phone that's something that again you might be able to do 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 it a little bit better and they were able to get these data here and interestingly if people started to use phones regularly before age 20 as most of the world is doing now there was four to eight times more brain cancer after they reached had past ten years so now why is there no increase in brain cancer that we can find in the general population today because there is not and after all if mobile phones really are important why don't we have an epidemic today well let me tell you why first of all brain cancer takes a long time to develop how do we know that we know that because when the bombs fell at the end of World War two there was no increase in brain cancer in the survivors who had been studied no increase at all until forty years had passed it took 40 years for an increase in brain cancer to show up in that highly exposed population now think about this today the number of people using cellphones today and using them heavily today is very different than it was even five years ago even three years ago now you're being encouraged to have unlimited talk and text right you didn't have unlimited talk and text five years ago or ten years ago so the uses and the users of phones are changing radically in fact most epidemiologic studies find no increased risk of brain cancer from mobile phone radiation they don't until 10 years of heavy use and by the way the way they define a cell phone user in these studies I'm not making this up is somebody who makes one call a week for six months yes that's this that wasn't yes one call a week for six months that was the definition in these studies which by the way don't find any increase all right so I'm not saying this to say that they did a bad job I'm saying that we are challenged here with how do you do a study of something that's rapidly changing while you're studying it the technology has changed the way people have used it has changed we never anticipated having infants and toddlers and cribs using these things nobody ever anticipated that there's never been any modeling of the brain until we did this right now and when I first stood my colleagues by the way took us four years to get this work done on four years ago I said let's let's do that modeling and they said what are you talking about why would anybody want to model an infant or a three-year-old using a mobile phone I said you wait unfortunately and so now we have a market because the adult market is saturated Australia already has more phones than people it does and so the market expands to the infants and toddlers now I want to share with you some of the work from my colleagues in India dr. Sharma is the senior deputy director-general of the Indian Council medical research and this work Malka I think will be a great interest to you because you work on honeybees we don't just have to wait for brain cancer to take 40 years to come up with answers honeybees have the advantage of being relatively easy to study and there actually are established protocols for doing this and I'm going to share with you some of these data and they have been developed by colleagues from a number of countries honeybees have different characteristic dance patterns and they have different jobs there's the worker bees and there's the bees that make the honey and there's the bees that protect the Queen and I don't know all the details but here's what I do know if you try to study these under controlled conditions you can take hives and put a mobile phone in some highs and a mobile phone and other hives that's not on and what you can find is that after exposing the honeybees to an operating mobile phone the workers don't come back to the hives now this ought to be of great concern because agriculture depends on honeybees I think you in Australia have a new business that's developed I know it in the United States where people drive trucks around with hives in it to fertilize crops have you heard of this they drive them around because the honeybees are disappearing now there are many different factors that affect honeybees climate is certainly one pesticides is certainly another but mobile phone radiation could be yet another and we certainly need to find out if that is the case ten minutes of mobile phone radiation daily for 10 days worker bees did not return to test colonies and this would be something that could easily be replicated so now we have to deal with reality there are many inconsistent results I'm not just skimming the cream here and showing you the positive ones there are a lot of studies that find nothing at all nothing why well first of all sometimes they study different cell cultures so if you're looking for adult cells they may be much more robust than if you're looking at neuronal stem cells and that turns out to be the case sometimes they're using different exposures if you're looking at continuous wave versus digital pulse signals if you're looking at a square wave versus a sine wave there's also another fact we have to talk about which is yet another reason why I'm glad that Australia is not America sponsored research this is to put it politely can induce publication bias another way to say this is that where you stand on an issue depends on where you sit and who's bought your chair and there's a tremendous amount of sponsored research by people who are hired to do studies to find no effect and that's plagued this field in a number of countries including within the government itself including within the government itself so I don't know about the details here with ARPANSA but I can tell you in the United States today the gentleman who is directing the Federal Communications Commission Tom wheeler was for 10 years the executive director of the cellphone telecommunications industry association and now he's in charge of regulating those devices so it's challenging to have a neutral playing field under that circumstance one example the US Congress asked for study of what needed to be done on mobile phone radiation in 1993 in 1998 in 2002 in 2012 that's how many times they've asked for that study to be done so each time a study is done and each time the 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 calling for it then it becomes a bit of a smokescreen so that's part of our challenge on this issue it's a lot easier to call for research than it is to carry it out this research is hard to do it's not simple there are real complexities to this field unfortunately at least in the past industry had a very clear strategy and in my book disconnect I document and quote in the new afterword that in 1994 when industry first became aware that there were studies suggesting that mobile phone radiation could damage brain cells of rats a memo was written to quote war - game the science war game the science this issue is far too important to be gamed it's not a matter of war it's a matter 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 with you about what could be done here are some of the policy responses that have developed so far there are right - no laws and policies labeling is spreading headsets must be provided with all phones in a number of countries and I'll get to those in a moment there are changes in Hardware and antenna design and software operating systems that can be developed and there are also changes to what we demand for proof of evidentiary burden any lawyers here right so the evidentiary burden that's being required for proof of harm is is is changing do you really want to have to prove that there's a significant increased risk of brain cancer before taking steps to reduce exposures to prevent that harm from happening that's really the question how much evidence do we need before taking precautionary steps and that's what brings me back to my days at the National Academy of Sciences when we seriously looked at the evidence on passive smoke and airplane travel we only finally took steps to act when it became clear that children of smokers were hospitalized more often that was the evidence that that we had to have and I would suggest that at this point we should be able to do better as a civilization we start with we need standardized ways to evaluate things there is no standardized metric that's something you could develop at this school in particular one of the other things that can be done which our colleagues in India are doing is to create cross-sectional surveys in this room right now you can divide this room up into people who are high medium and low cellphone users it's probably nobody who doesn't have a phone or who will admit to it right now but if you did look at people cross sectionally and you looked at their memory and their reaction time and their reproductive health you would learn a lot from that and they are doing that now in India and we'll talk some more about that in my conversations that I'll have with some of the faculty later on in the meantime some schools are promoting wired school programs with shared banks of computers and public educational efforts are really proceeding to let people know you shouldn't have to find that information buried inside your phone I mean come on that's not fair parents teachers and health professionals should be informed and they in turn can work with students to make sure people are using technology in a safe away as possible now here's some of the other policies that have been developed in France there's a ban on advertising to young children under age 12 by the way all cell phones have to be sold with earpieces there has to be labeling of the specific absorption rate on phones and there's got to be warnings in India they've lowered their tower limits to 1/10 that of the international standards and they have official guidelines for cell phone use using headsets and speaker phones the Supreme Court in India has actually ordered a number of towers to be torn down but it's it's a very tough battle to have to fight rather than having to get a tower torn down there ought to be siting rules and policies that make sense and in many countries there are no real sensible siting policies Israel which is a country that has a lot of important issues to deal with right now has a National Institute on non ionizing radiation they say no Wi-Fi in kindergarten they all prefer wired over wireless in schools all phones again are to come with headsets and safety and no advertising with children in Belgium the law has been implemented as of 2014 it was passed in 2013 no phones are to be designed or sold for children under the age of 7 again all handsets must be sold with headsets and the sale to young children is specifically prohibited prohibited Canada has issued practical advice as well and I don't go intending more details here these slides will become available on the website for the University and we have much more detailed information I can share with you from our website as well the Canadian parliamentary Health Committee has urged that there be a recognition that this is a quote serious serious public health issue and we agree and I testified before the Canadian Parliament on this issue and I was pleased to see their report agree 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 for action in the Public Health and regulatory sectors is upon us and I think that that is a very important idea that we should all be aware of let's not debate the kinds of evidence we have now about brain cancer I agree that evidence can be debated but we have enough evidence of damage and we have these other countries have taken steps now they can't all be dismissed Berkeley California has unanimously passed the cellphone right-to-know law it's called an ordinance requiring notification that if you carry your phone in your pants or shirt pocket or tucked into a bra when the phone is on you may exceed the federal guidelines for exposure to RF radiation this is a website that has all of the fine print warnings so far as we know them available Environmental Health Trust is working with others to share this information we hope you'll share it with all of your friends and family this is the baby safe project that we have underway and now just so you understand that this is not a question of being anti industry here's what industry is doing Vodafone has to provide a report to the American government as part of their annual reporting to the Security and Exchange Commission they must report on what are called risk factors and uncertainties and they report that they face risks because they may have to pay people for health damages the last sentence there a change to this view that there's no health problem could result in a major reduction in phone usage or major litigation that's a risk China Mobile in their reports the US Securities and Exchange Commission they had to say we cannot be certain that future studies will not impute a link between electromagnetic fields and adverse health effects and because of that it's a potential risk as well AT&T says unfavorable litigation could result and require us to pay significant amounts of money well speaking of money would you give two cents would you pay two cents a month for every device you have for every provider for every manufacturer in order to support the cross-disciplinary training program that is needed in bio electromagnetics for engineers and physicians and computer scientists that's what's needed to identify the data gaps the research and development needs to monitor the populations to see what is happening to our children today to look at hearing and 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 way after I went to all that schooling you mentioned at the beginning and it's not easy stuff to do I hold my head off to all of you electrical engineers it's complicated but in the meantime people have a right to know how you can minimize exposure and again I think this information is available on our website will be a vase available on yours remember if you have to give a phone to a child put it on airplane mode and think about this that microwave oven it works because there's a metal box around the microwave signal and the signal pings all over the place next time you get into an elevator or a train for any length of time put your phone on airplane mode otherwise that signals going all over the place magnifying and coming back keep the mobile phone away from you when it's on and you are asleep now it takes a village to do a lot of things these are some of the people whose materials I've used today with their permission and I can't read this list to you but I want you to know that I feel really honored to be working with some of the most challenged people in the world on this issue and they have given me permission to share these materials with you and I leave you with this thought and from Albert Einstein the world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything so thank you

Channel: The University of Melbourne

Views: 4,088,923

Rating: 4.7678413 out of 5

Keywords: University, of, Melbourne

Id: BwyDCHf5iCY

Length: 61min 29sec (3689 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/1345834]

Video description:

"The truth about mobile phone and wireless radiation: what we know, what we need to find out, and what you can do now" Presented by Dr Devra Davis, Visiting Professor of Medicine at the Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School, and Visiting Professor of Medicine at Ondokuz Mayis University, Turkey.

The Lecture What are the health effects of mobile phones and wireless radiation? While Australia has led the world in safety standards, including compulsory seat-belt legislation, plain packaging on cigarettes, and product and food disclosure legislation, it falls behind in addressing the significant issues associated with mobile phone use. In this Dean’s Lecture, epidemiologist and electromagnetic radiation expert, Dr Devra Davis, will outline the evolution of the mobile phone and smartphone, and provide a background to the current 19 year old radiation safety standards (SAR), policy developments and international legislation. New global studies on the health consequences of mobile/wireless radiation will be presented, including children’s exposure and risks.

The Speaker Dr Devra Davis is an internationally recognised expert on electromagnetic radiation from mobile phones and other wireless transmitting devices. She is currently the Visiting Professor of Medicine at the Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School, and Visiting Professor of Medicine at Ondokuz Mayis University, Turkey. Dr Davis was Founding Director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at The University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute —­ the first institute of its kind in the world, to examine the environmental factors that contribute to the majority of cases of cancer.

In 2007, Dr Devra Davis founded non­profit Environmental Health Trust to provide basic research and education about environmental health hazards. Dr Davis served as the President Clinton appointee to the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board in the U.S.A. from 1994–­1999, an independent executive branch agency that investigates, prevents and mitigates chemical accidents. As the former Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary for Health in the Department of Health and Human Services, she has counseled leading officials in the United States, United Nations, European Environment Agency, Pan American Health Organization, World Health Organization, and World Bank.

Dr Davis holds a B.S. in physiological psychology and an M.A. in sociology from the University of Pittsburgh, 1967. She completed a PhD in science studies at the University of Chicago as a Danforth Foundation Graduate Fellow, 1972 and a M.P.H. in epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University as a Senior National Cancer Institute Post-­Doctoral Fellow, 1982. She has authored more than 200 publications and has been published in Lancet and Journal of the American Medical Association as well as the Scientific American and the New York Times.

Dr Devra Davis is an internationally recognised expert on electromagnetic radiation from mobile phones and other wireless transmitting devices.

[u/MattTheFlash]

TL;DR?

[u/easilypersuadedsquid]

That was really quite worrying. I've heard different things about this though and one omission I noted is that she didn't really give a mechanism of action and conversely I've read that "non ionising radiation" can't have these effects. Or maybe I'm getting mixed up with people claiming to have electrical sensitivity syndrome? I think everyone should watch this video.