Kennisplatform: Geen duidelijkheid relatie hersentumoren - mobiele telefoon. Reactie Stopumts.

Geplaatst 15 dec. 2011.
Updated 16 dec. 2011 met onderstaand gerelateerd bericht.
Updated 19 dec met de bijdrage van Dariusz Leszczynski. (Punt 5)
Updated woensdag 21 dec. (Gehaktdag***).

Gerelateerd bericht: Berichten%20Internationaal/6340 .

Op 15 dec. 2011 publiceerde Het Kennisplatform Elektromagnetische velden een memo: “Wetenschap geeft geen duidelijkheid over relatie tussen hersentumoren en gebruik mobiele telefoon”.

De publicatie kunt u lezen op:
www.kennisplatform.nl .

Bij de publicatie zijn enkele kanttekeningen te maken:

1.
De indeling in categorie 2B (mogelijk kankerverwekkend) heeft nog een onderverdeling in stoffen die laag (zoals koffie voor uitsluitend prostaatkanker) en hoog (zoals DDT voor verschillende kankers) gerangschikt zijn in de betreffende categorie. Volgens een toelichting in Brussel op 17 okt. 2011 door David Gee, bij de European Environmental Agency verantwoordelijk voor de publicatie ''Late Lessons from Early Warnings'', behoort de straling van mobiele telefonie thuis in de hoogste regio van categorie 2B (en is dus eerder te vergelijken met DDT, al jaren in Nederland verboden, dan met koffie).

2.
Enkele leden van de desbetreffende Commissie bij het IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer , een onderzoeksinstituut van de WHO) hebben informeel te kennen gegeven dat een indeling in categorie 2A (waarschijnlijk kankerverwekkend) hun persoonlijke voorkeur zou hebben.

3.
Het hoofd van de Reflexstudie (prof. Adlkofer) heeft te kennen gegeven dat indien in-vitro studies bij de beoordeling meegenomen zouden zijn de IARC zonder twijfel tot een indeling in categorie 2A besloten zou hebben.

4.
De discrepantie tussen kankerregistratie en uitkomsten van epidemiologisch onderzoek is uitputtend behandeld door onder meer de Zweedse onderzoeksjournaliste Mona Nilson. Zie daartoe haar recente publicatie op 12 dec. 2011 ''Highest risk for mobile phone users in Sweden – but brain tumour incidence rates are underreported'' op News Voice:
newsvoice.se/2011/12/12/highest-risk-for-mobile-phone-users-in-sweden-but-brain-tumour-incidence-rates-are-underreported/ .

5.
Zie over datzelfde onderwerp het deskundig commentaar van de Finse wetenschappper Dariusz Leszczynski ''Why are epidemiologists (mis)leading us about cell phone radiation exposure?'' in de Washington Times van 16 dec. 2011.
Dariusz Leszczynski is Research Professor en lid van de Finse stralingscommissie RNSA (Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority); hij maakt in zijn statistische analyse gehakt*** van de Deense Cohortstudie'':
communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/between-rock-and-hard-place/2011/dec/16/cellphone-epidemiologist-raditiation-danish-cohort/ .

Maar wij waarderen de titel van de huidige publicatie van het Kennisplatform ''Wetenschap geeft geen duidelijkheid over relatie tussen hersentumoren en gebruik mobiele telefoon”, immers het Kennisplatform geeft met deze titel indirect aan dat bij de huidige onzekerheid het voorzorgsprincipe in werking dient te treden.

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Toevoeging 21 dec 2011:

*** Leszczynski:
The major flaw of the study is that the only information about the exposure to cell phone radiation by the study study participants is how long the person owned a mobile phone. The study simply offers no information of actual exposure.

Another major problem of this study is that from the start the cohort of 723,421 cell phone subscribers excluded 200,507 corporate subscribers. This means that the heaviest exposed persons – those who were using cell phones for day-to-day business use - were omitted. It is important to remember that during the 1982 – 1995 period cell phones were expensive for private subscribers, limiting their exposure to possible cancer causing daily use.

The number of flaws in the design of this study, lead to a number of paradoxes.

Paradox #1: Two persons, one of whom spends many hours per week on the phone and the other who spends just a few minutes per week, are analyzed as belonging to the same exposure group when they own the cell phone subscription for the same length of time.

This means that highly exposed and nearly unexposed persons are mixed up in the same exposure group.

Paradox #2: And I quote from the article “…Because we excluded corporate subscriptions, mobile phone users who do not have a subscription in their own name will have been misclassified as unexposed….” It means that the highly exposed corporate users, who did not have personal phone subscriptions (nobody knows how many), have ended up as non-exposed controls.

This is a grave error in the study design that can compared to a scientist performing experiments on living cells in the laboratory and, before measuring results, taking some of the most exposed cells and mixing them with the non-exposed cells and using the mix as a control. Such ''preparation'' of the control sample, would be condemned and the study deemed as unreliable and unpublishable.

Yet, this is exactly what the Danish Cohort study has done. They “contaminated” the control groups, mixing heavily, and lightly exposed persons. It is difficult to understand how such a flawed study passed through the peer-review of the appointed reviewers and journal editors.

Paradox #3: Any person whose subscription begun after the cut off year of the study (1995) was considered as non-exposed by the “standards” of the study because he/she did not own cell phone subscription before year 1995.

For example, a person who was diagnosed in 2007 with the brain cancer and who had cell phone subscription from 1996 was, by the design of the Danish Cohort study, considered as a non-exposed person who got cancer.

Whereas, in reality, this is a person exposed to cell phone radiation for 11 years who got the brain cancer.

Just based on the above critical evaluation, the Danish Cohort study should never be published in its present form.

But the reality is (still) different and the flawed Danish Cohort study is currently a “valid” peer-reviewed article published on the pages of the British Medical Journal.

It is not uncommon that once discovered, either the journal editors or the authors themselves retract flawed studies. An extreme case of this happened just this year, when the Editor-in-Chief Wolfgang Wagner resigned from Remote Sensing journal after mainstream scientists disavowed the flawed paper published in this journal.

The editors of the British Medical Journal need explain how the Danish Cohort passed the peer-review.

The Editors of the British Medical Journal should immediately withdraw Danish Cohort study.

The conclusions of this flawed-design study are not supportable by the obtained flawed data and the studies conclusions are misleading. They are leading the public to believe that the cell phones are safe, when no such claim can be made based on the Danish Cohort study.

In fact, no reliable scientific conclusion can be drawn from the flawed Danish Cohort study. Which lends us to ask if epidemiologists are misleading us by leading us to believe in something that is not supportable by their study?



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