Why was the NTP so ambivalent about its cell phone cancer findings at the press conference last Friday when two years ago the same scientific evidence prompted a public health warning?

Some of the pathology numbers got tweaked since they were first released in 2016, but the changes were minor. It’s the same data set —but with a very different interpretation. The NTP mindset somehow shifted from we need to release this important new health data now to this is “not a high-risk situation.”

Who or what moved the NTP managers to change their outlook? There’s no shortage of suspects and suspicions. Here are a few making the rounds:

¶ There’s new leadership at the NTP. John Bucher, who ran the RF project and called for the 2016 early release is no longer the associate director. Brian Berridge has taken his place and now manages NTP’s day-to-day affairs. Berridge is so new on the job he may not have a chance to push for any changes. Still, he comes from SmithKlineGlaxo, a drug company with a capitalization of close to $100 billion. That’s Big Pharma and the corporate mindset that comes with it. Bucher is still at NTP, as a senior scientist, but he does not run the show like he did two years ago.

¶ Linda Birnbaum, the director of both NIEHS and the NTP and Berridge’s boss, is already under fire from House Republicans for advocating the control of toxic chemicals. Last month, she was accused of lobbying for public health. (Sounds strange, but so does much of what goes on in Washington these days.) Birnbaum can only fight so many political battles at the same time. RF may be a bridge too far.

¶ Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, is said to have no confidence in the RF study. He tried to stop the early release of the cancer data two years ago. Michael Lauer, a senior NIH manager who was a major critic of the NTP study back then, was believed to be speaking for Collins.

¶ The head of the FDA center with oversight on cell phones dismissed the evidence of a cancer risk as “mostly equivocal or ambiguous.” Nothing would change, he said. Think of the FDA as NTP’s client: It nominated the animal study back in 1999 and now wants nothing more to do with it.

¶ The Trump Administration ridicules scientific evidence that threatens big business. Whether the subject is global warming, chemical safety or radiation protection, bureaucrats are aware that they have to watch what they say if they want to keep their jobs. Just last week, a brigadier general was tossed off the National Security Council for suggesting that the coming 5G network be nationalized.

¶ The military is also in the mix. It’s an even bigger force in RF science than the telecoms. All modern weapon systems use RF radiation in one way or another. The U.S. Air Force and Navy are likely more worried about the NTP linking RF to cancer than anyone else. In 1984, the USAF’s Guy study showed that rats exposed to microwaves got cancer. It took eight years for those results to appear in a journal. By then, they were mostly forgotten.

¶ Many outsiders want to discredit the NTP findings. A well-documented example is the rumor mill at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

¶ When the brain cancer controversy began in the early 90’s, the major cell phone companies were Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Today, the major players are Apple, Google and Microsoft, the high-tech darlings of Wall Street. Each has a capitalization approaching a trillion dollars (at least before the stock market started to tank last week). They run a massive lobbying operation in Washington and keep a low profile on RF. It’s hard to know what they are saying and doing.

¶ NIEHS has a long history of dropping the ball on EMFs and RF radiation. Years ago, long before cell phones, the late David Rall, the then director of NIEHS, predicted that microwaves would be the environmental challenge of the 21^st century. He then immediately zeroed out the institute’s microwave research budget. (See our “Will NIEHS Ever ‘Get“ EMFs?” from 2010.)

Fittingly, the March 26-28 peer review of the NTP RF reports will be held in the David Rall building on the NIEHS campus.

For more on the NTP RF project, follow this link.

A few days ago, I received an urgent warning from a longtime contact in Sweden. An industry associate had told him that the U.S. National Toxicology Program’s study on cell phone cancer risks http://microwavenews.com/news-center/ntp-cancer-results was screwed up and essentially “useless.”

I was tempted to disregard it as nothing more than a corporate delusion. But the original source was said to be Maria Feychting, http://ki.se/en/people/marfey  a professor at the Karolinska Institute and the vice chair of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) http://www.icnirp.org/ She had cast doubt on the landmark $25 million NTP RF–animal study in a talk presented at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences http://www.kva.se/en/startsida  —the institute that awards the Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry every year.

I decided I had to check out the rumor.

The crux of Feychting’s argument, I was told, is that the pathology analyses were not properly blinded. That is, the pathologists were aware which samples had come from the exposed animals and which were from the controls. The diagnoses were therefore subject to bias and could not be trusted. The net result would be that the higher tumor rates reported by the NTP had, as the rumor put it, “no value.”

The evidence, I was told, is buried in Appendix C of the NTP’s report of its “partial findings,” https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/26/055699 issued in May 2016 (pp.21-22):

“All PWG [Pathology Working Group] reviews were conducted blinded with respect to treatment group and only identified the test article as “test agent A” or “test agent B.”

Feychting and others appear to have assumed that “A” and “B” were code for the exposed and controls rats.

They were wrong.

“The PWGs were carried out on slides that were blinded as to exposure group or control,” John Bucher, https://irp.nih.gov/pi/john-bucher the study director and the associate director of the NTP wrote in an e-mail when asked about the Feychting rumor by Microwave News. He also confirmed that agents “A” & “B” referred to the different RF modulations.

This same concern had already been raised and addressed during the internal NTP review prior to the release of the interim results last year. That report states that “A” and “B” refer to the two types of cell phone signals under study, GSM and CDMA (p.69).

Feychting did not respond to a request for comment.

A Rumor is Born at an ICNIRP Workshop

ICNIRP invited Bucher to present the results of the NTP study at a meeting JointNoteSystemsofProtectionNov2017  held in Munich, November 8-10. Most of what Bucher said had already been presented at the BioEM 2016  http://www.bioem2016.org/ conference in Ghent last year. There was nothing new, said Martin Röösli https://www.swisstph.ch/en/staff/profile/people/martin-roeoesli/ of the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute in Basel. Röösli, a member http://www.icnirp.org/en/about-icnirp/commission/index.html of ICNIRP, attended both meetings.

Bucher recalls that the ICNIRP members asked a lot of questions about the NTP study, especially about the pathology review procedures. (These are spelled out in detail in Appendix C of last year’s interim report.)

I asked Eric van Rongen, http://www.icnirp.org/en/about-icnirp/commission/details/chair.html  the chair of ICNIRP, for a copy of the agenda of the ICNIRP meeting. He refused, explaining that it was a “closed meeting.”

Maria Feychting of the Karolinska Institute Cites Pathology Bias