Cancer Clusters, clusters of ill health, depression and even suicide were predicted^[1] several years ago in proximity to Mobile Phone Masts and other Wireless sources of Microwave Radiation. Yet the UK Government has long ignored such warnings.

The extremely sad situation in Kingswinford where another Cancer Cluster has been discovered in proximity to a monster Mobile Phone Mast platform is one of the latest examples ^[2]. This is consistent with the study from 3-4 years ago in Naila in Germany^[3].

The incredibly worrying and increasing suicide cluster in Bridgend^[4] , with the latest suicide just last week, 16^th June 2008^[8], a town with a large concentration of Mobile Phone Masts and town-wide Wi-Fi^[5] (Wi-Fi since 2006 or so) – should be the subject of an open and transparent Public Inquiry looking at all the factors.

The Mobile Phone Industry must be aware of the dangers and health risks themselves – one example being  how, in 2000, The ECOLOG Report^[6,12] (containing damning evidence of harm  from Mobile Phones) – but paid for by T-Mobile in Germany - was not widely published at the time - it re-surfaced quietly into the public domain several years later. In the US Dr. George Carlo, a leading epidemiologist who formerly headed the $28 million Wireless Technology Research (WTR) program funded by the Mobile Phone Industry, warned the Mobile Phone Industry about the dangers in the 1990’s yet his findings were not published^[9].

It is already untenable for the UK Government and the Health Protection Agency [HPA] to ignore the growing amount of evidence of the harm that Mobile Phone Masts are causing. It was for this reason that a Mast Sanity delegation led by Trustee Yasmin Skelt delivered a copy of the BioInitaitive Report^[7] to Downing Street in December 2007 and why she led another delegation to Downing Street 2 weeks ago  demanding immediate action from Gordon Brown.

Trustee Yasmin Skelt said “We are calling on the Health Protection Agency to carry out proper epidemiological studies of suicide[11] and cancer clusters using protocols developed by Dr. Gerd Oberfeld^[10]  (MD).  Researchers need to know where the masts are, how long they have been there and the technical details.  The link between electromagnetic fields and depression has been known since the 1930s”

Mast Sanity is the largest group in the country campaigning for the safe siting of masts and has links with related groups globally. We request and would welcome a meeting with the Prime Minister or his Ministers to discuss maximising safety from mobile telephony for the general population.

Again, Mast Sanity ask the Prime Minister to instruct the Chief Medical Officer and the Health Protection Agency [HPA] to issue warnings to the British public and ensure that Public exposure limits are greatly reduced immediately. Those responsible in Government, the HPA, ICNIRP as well as the Industry will be held to account for their continuing lack of action on this issue, continuing to fail to protect citizens from the health hazards of Electro-Magnetic Fields [EMFs].

Notes and References:

[1] Neil Cherry Predictions 2000 - http://www.mastsanity.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=90

In June 2000 Professor Cherry investigated microwave emissions from mobile phone masts and presented his evidence to the parliaments of New Zealand, Italy, Austria, Ireland and the EU. He warned of significant illnesses and death from these microwaves.

[2] Cancer Cluster at Kingswinford - http://www.itvlocal.com/central/news/?player=CEN_News_15&void=202039

And http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1027699/14-die-cancer-seven-years-living-phone-mast-highest-radiation-levels-UK.html

[3] The Naila Study (Eger et al.): http://www.tetrawatch.net/papers/naila.pdf

[4] Suicides ‘linked to phone masts’ - http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/49330/Suicides-linked-to-phone-masts- and http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/south-wales-news/bridgend-maesteg/2008/01/31/boffin-s-wave-claim-after-suicide-spate-91466-20414722/ Barrie Trower: “It’s the young who get it first,” he said. “The younger you are, your skull is thinner than an adult’s so the waves can go through and your immune system is not fully developed. The suicide rate is leaping up all over the place and it happens to cluster in areas.”

[5] Bridgend town-wide Wi-fi http://www.walesonline.co.uk/business-in-wales/business-news/tm_objectid=15400202&method=full&siteid=50082&headline=bridgend-makes-wifi-history-name_page.html

[6] The 2000 ECOLOG Report - http://www.hese-project.org/hese-uk/en/niemr/ecologsum.php

[7] The BioInitiative Report 2007 - http://www.hese-project.org/hese-uk/en/niemr/news.php?id=bioinitiative

[8] Inquiry after man is found hanged -  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/7459041.stm

[9] Dr. George Carlo letter to AT&T, 7th October 1999 - http://www.emf-health.com/reports-carlo-att.htm

“Today, I sit here extremely frustrated and concerned that appropriate steps have not been taken by the wireless industry to protect consumers during this time of uncertainty about safety. The steps I am referring to specifically followed from the WTR program and have been recommended repeatedly in public and private for and by me and other experts from around the world. As I prepare to move away from the wireless phone issue and into a different public health direction. I am concerned that the wireless industry is missing a valuable opportunity by dealing with these public health concerns through politics, creating illusions that more research over the next several years helps consumers today, and false claims that regulatory compliance means safety. The better choice by the wireless industry would be to implement measured steps aimed at true consumer protection.”

[10] Dr. Gerd Oberfeld – Austrian Phone Mast Case Study - http://www.powerwatch.org.uk/news/20080325_oberfeld_mast_cancer.asp

[11] Largest Study Finds Evidence Of Association Between EMFs And Exposed Worker Suicide

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/03/000316070218.htm

[12] ECOLOG Clarification  http://www.hese-project.org/hese-uk/en/niemr/nietzke.php

Backlash to Bridgend Story at [4] above:

Powerwatch : Phone Masts Linked to suicide : http://www.powerwatch.org.uk/news/20080624_masts_suicide.asp

Guardian Bad Science - "Suicide, Aids and a masts campaigner" :  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/28/sciencenews.mobilephones and blog version http://www.badscience.net/2008/06/roger-coghill-fails-the-aids-test/#more-721 [some background to the Bad Science column ]

Response to Guardian story by Roger Coghill:-

(Introduction - in green - by Dr. Andrew Goldsworthy)

"Hello All,

As you will see if you read the following, the link may not be so much with geomagnetic field variations as with the simultaneous presence of cell phone towers and town-wide municipal Wifi. Bridgend is a Wifi town, as are Maesteg and Porthcawl, and all three have experienced juvenile suicides since the installation of the Wifi. Two lots of radiation may be worse than one.

I am pasting in a comment posted by Roger Coghill himself in response to a heavily biased article by Ben Goldacre in the UK “Guardian” newspaper on the subject. Coghill sets out the scientific substance of a telephone interview with Goldacre, which points out, amongst other things, a possible relationship between suicide and exposure to both cell phone and Wifi radiation. The final Goldacre article showed little relation to this and turned out to be more of a personal attack on Coghill. Coghill's reply is as follows: -"
 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/28/sciencenews.mobilephones?commentpage=4

"Right of reply to an ad hominem attack is presumably acceptable, though I see that several comments about Ben Goldacre's philipic of 28 June have been removed without reason. Clearly the Sunday Express front page article reporting my suggestion that the Bridgend district suicides might be linked to RF/MW eposure touched a raw nerve, with towards 200 comments. Goldacre hasn't done a good job, however, having omitted a good deal, and the points below will identify his lacunae. In response to his request for more information I replied that the release I put out was in February, and that since no media had taken up the suggestion for four months, during which time five more cases had appeared, the data needed reexamination. I invited Goldacre to collaborate with me in validating the data, collected from Ofcom's Sitefinder and the actual addresses of the original 17 cases, but he did not respond. I pointed pout that I had never claimed to be a doctor, and this misappellation was entirely due to the Sunday Express.

The gist of my suggestion was that a much fuller investigation should be carried out, comparing the district with other regions where the terrain is flat (e.g. East Anglia, where suicides are among the lowest in UK, whereas those in Wales and Scotland, with hilly regions, are among the highest). Goldacre failed to mention this.

I pointed out that there have now been 15 peer reviewed studies investigating EMF exposure and depressive illness and suicide, of which 13 showed a positive association. Goldacre omitted this small fact from his article. He also failed to mention that the Welsh Secretary had only a few weeks earlier expressed concern about the above average suicide levels in Wales.

In April 2005 Bridgend Council proudly announced that their town would be the first in the UK to have a public Wi Fi system, and if it proved successful this would be extended to Porthcawl and Maesteg. All three towns since then have suffered from juvenile suicides.

Goldacre has abdicated his responsibility as a serious journalist by not reporting accurately, by omitting important facts, by declining an invitation to check my figures, and this is not the first occasion. One wonders why since 2003 he has been attacking the idea that RF radiation is a possible health hazard, against increasing evidence that there is a problem. Could it be that around that time Liz Forgan of BBC Radio took up her position, I believe as Chairman, on the Scott Trust which owns the Guardian?

Most of the remaining ad hominem remarks in Goildacre's article are not related to the Bridgend suicides (as one might expect in any ad hominem attack) and I will deal with these in a separate post. Meanwhile please could some of your readers ask alongside myself that this suggestion, that RF radiation from Wi Fi and cellphone masts is able to cause depressive illness and suicide in young people, is properly investigated?

If this suggestion is as important as I believe, then the Welsh Assembly Government should be looking into it. I never set out to produce a publishable document, and anyone with a few spare hours could check these distances."

(end comment by Dr. Goldsworthy - in green):- 

"The original Guardian article can be found at: -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/28/sciencenews.mobilephones
If you read it, you will see that most of Coghill’s science has been removed and replaced by what appears to be a thinly veiled personal attack on him. I leave it to you to decide which side has the greater scientific integrity.

Best wishes

Andrew"

and more from Roger Coghill:-

"Here below are the references to 16 peer review published studies investigating EMF in relation to depressive illness and suicide that someone asked for. By the way, I think one commentator meant the Sunday Express not the Daily Mail as the origin of the Bridgend article about which this thread is concerned.

Suicide and depression

View of ICNIRP

A major review published by ICNIRP in 2001 concluded:

"When assessing the overall literature on EMF and suicide, it is necessary to consider the relative weights of the available studies together with their results. In doing so the original study must be given a relatively light weight in relation to later studies because of methodological limitations. Nevertheless, the latest study also suggests that an excess risk may indeed exist.

The literature on depressive symptoms and EMF is difficult to interpret because the findings are not consistent. This complexity cannot easily be resolved by suggesting that one type of result can be confined to a group of studies with methodological problems or some other limitation." More on ICNIRP

View of NRPB

In its new advice on exposure guidelines in 2004, NRPB stated:

Studies of suicide and depressive illness have given inconsistent results in relation to ELF EMF exposure… More on NRPB

The key papers

We give here the abstracts from the key epidemiological papers on suicide and depression.

Suicide and depression abstracts

Epidemiological studies of suicide and depression and magnetic fields

We provide here the abstracts for the major epidemiological studies of magnetic fields or power lines and suicide and depression.

Baris and Armstrong 1990 Suicide, occupational

Baris, Armstrong, Deadman and Theriault 1996 Suicide, occupational

Beale, Pearce, Conroy, Henning and Murrell 1997 Psychological effects, power lines

Dowson, Lewith, Campbell, Mullee and Brewster 1998 Headaches and depression, power lines

McDowall 1986 Mortality (including suicide), power lines

McMahan, Ericson and Meyer 1994 Depression, power lines

Perry, Pearl and Binns 1989 Depression, residential magnetic field

Perry, Reichmanis, Marino and Becker 1981 Suicide, residential magnetic field

Poole, Kavet, Funch, Donelan, Charry and Dreyer 1993 Headaches and depression power lines

Reichmanis, Perry, Marino and Becker 1979 Suicide, power lines

Savitz, Boyle and Holmgreen 1994 Depression, occupation

van Wijngaarden, Savitz, Kleckner, Cai and Loomis 2000 Suicide, occupation

van Wijngaarden, Savitz, Kleckner, Cai and Loomis 2000 Suicide, occupation

Verkasalo, Kaprio, Varjonen, Romanov, Heikkila and Koskenvuo 1997 Depression, power lines

Zyss, Dobrowolski and Krawczyk 1997 Depression, power lines

Zyss 1999 Depression, power lines

There is a synopsis of these papers on the NGC website. Hope this helps."


and

"I would direct people interested in learning in detail about the emerging evidence that RF/MW radiation at levels well below the present ten year old ICNIRP guidelines is associated with a number of ill health condition to www.bioinitiative.org, a 610 page document prepared by a number of scientists from around the world. it is arguably the most comprehensive review ever put between one set of covers. Hover it is not peer reviewed, but the quality is well upto peer review standards, in my opinion. Also if you visit Entrez Pubmed you can read the latest E-prints prior to peer review publication, as well as all the peer reviewed existing literature. Hope this helps."

and from CliffordGMiller

"As usual, Ben has failed to disclose his conflicting interests. He also engages in his favourite game of demanding very high standards of evidence from those he ridicules but not for his own line of work, psychiatry or when it suits him.

Ben is great buddies with James Rubin of the Mobile Phones Research Unit. The MPRU is funded by government and the mobile phone industry through the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme. So we can clearly not expect any research proving microwaves are harmful.

And those with slightly longer memones will recall Ben attacking Panorama for a programme on the hazards of WiFi, which were raised by Sir William Stewart, former Chair of responsible for the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme and now Chair of the Health Protection Agency.

Goldacre and Rubin are also connected with the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College and The Maudesly. Goldacre also works for controversial Gulf War and ME/CFS psychiatrist Professor Simon Wessley, who also has close working relations with Rubin and the Mobile Phones Research Unit, as seen here.

To show you how close and chummy Goldacre's and his boss Wessley's personal working relationship is with James Rubin and the Kings' Mobile Phone Research Unit, please follow these connections.

Goldacre wrote this piece anonymously in the Guardian Thursday December 4, 2003:-

"The strange case of the magnetic wine"

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,,1099083,00.html

And here is the confirmation from his blog he is the author:-

http://www.badscience.net/?p=192

Ben said "Strangely, none of these companies seems to be boasting about having done the simple study necessary to test the wine magnets. As always, if any do want advice on how to do the stats on a simple double-blind randomised trial, which could, after all, be done pretty robustly in one evening with 50 people - and if they cant find a 17-year-old science student to hold their hand - I am at their disposal."

And after that the very same James Rubin from Kings' Mobile Phone Research Unit arranged exactly this experiment, including that it was run by "16 year old work experience students" (as Rubin, Wessely et al, claim in the paper's "Conclusions" - pdf weblink below). And a few months later, Goldacre writes about Rubin's paper in the Guardian.

"What is science? First, magnetise your wine" ... Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday December 3 2005

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/dec/03/badscience.uknews

Whilst it is all a "jolly jape" in the Oxbridge tradition, this is also a good example showing how medics like Rubin, Goldacre and Wessely should not try to undertake science science (reasons set out below). It also begs the question why the Guardian has a doctor with only medical and not science qualifications writing a science column. Why do they use someone with sound scientific credentials instead of someone with none who equates his ability to "a 17-year-old science student" but has numerous direct and indirect connections to GlaxoSmithKline and its hangers on? This is clearly not a rhetorical question.

Rubin's experiment in scientific terms is fundamentally flawed, even though it is meant to be testing something most people would dismiss out of hand as a matter of common sense. And Goldacre fails to pick up on this. It might be his lack of formal acientific qualifications and that he is a psychiatrist and not a trained scientist.

If you are going to test something, you need to ensure your test equipment can detect that which your experiment is supposedly designed to test, and this is an even more fundamental point than just calibration. Rubin's "experiment", which so impressed Ben, failed to test whether the subjects could tell the diffierence between one wine or another.

The experiment did not test something as simple as if the people concerned could tell red from white in a blind tasting. So in fact, we still do not know in scientific terms according to this experiment, whether the device being tested did or did not work as claimed.

Ben Goldacre was so impressed in his Guardian article with the maths of Rubin's "power" calculation in the published paper, but he did not address its lack of significance. Is this because he is not trained to think like a scientist and nor trained in the level of mathematics that pure scientists are.

Co-author of Rubin's paper is Professor Simon Wessley:-

"Drawn to drink: A double-blind randomised cross-over trial of the effects of magnets on the taste of cheap red wine"

Authors: G. James Rubin; Gareth Hahn - Edward Allberry; Ross Innes; Simon Wessely

Affiliation: Department of Psychological Medicine, King's College London, London, UK

Journal of Wine Research, Volume 16, Issue 1 April 2005 , pages 65 - 70

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/1781697153-40559942/content%7Econtent=a727179225%7Edb=all%7Eorder=page"

Background example case "My hell trying not to commit suicide due to microwave radiation" - http://www.mast-victims.org/index.php?content=journal&action=view&type=journal&id=162

More Science: "Suicides and exposure to low doses of ionising radiation" - http://www.inderscience.com/search/index.php?action=record&rec_id=15813