A scientific review commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO) claims it found no link between cellphone use and brain cancer. The review was available online Aug. 30 in Environmental International.

The publication — which focused largely on brain cancer but also cancer risk in general — is part of a WHO-commissioned series of scientific reviews of the possible health risks of wireless radiation.

Joel Moskowitz, Ph.D., director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California, Berkeley, accused the review of being biased.

Moskowitz is a member of the International Commission on the Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields (ICBE-EMF), a “consortium of scientists, doctors and related professionals” who study radiofrequency-electromagnetic radiation (RF-EMF) and make recommendations for RF-EMF exposure guidelines “based on the best peer-reviewed scientific research publications.”

He has conducted and disseminated research related to wireless technology and public health since 2009.

In a post published Tuesday on his Electromagnetic Radiation Safety website, Moskowitz wrote:

“The WHO selected scientists to conduct systematic literature reviews on the biologic and health risks of wireless radiation who had demonstrated their bias through prior publications by either not finding evidence of harm or dismissing any evidence they found.”

The WHO’s review reached very different conclusions than those reached by Moskowitz and his colleagues in a 2020 review of cellphone use and cancer tumor risk.

“I believe that our 2020 review of cellphone use and tumor risk is less biased and will withstand the test of time better than the new review commissioned by the WHO,” Moskowitz wrote.

Miriam Eckenfels-Garcia, director of Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR) & Wireless program, told The Defender, “Unfortunately, we are used to the WHO getting some really important things wrong.”

She added:

“The protection of human health should always be the priority and, sadly, this does not seem to be the case here.

“The fact that the WHO handpicked scientists who are clearly biased to conduct such an important review and excluded scientific voices that reached different conclusions signals what we already know — that the WHO is as captured by big industry as our own regulatory agencies.”

For their review, the WHO researchers looked at 5,060 study records published between 1994 and 2022 and then narrowed them down, based on multiple criteria, to 63 studies for the final analysis.

Their goal was to assess the strength and quality of the possible link between RF-EMF exposure and neoplatistic, meaning tumorous, disease.

They concluded that RF radiation from cellphone use “likely does not increase the risk of brain cancer.”

Specifically, they said there was “moderate certainty evidence” that RF-EMF from cellphones held near the head “does not increase the risk of glioma, meningioma, acoustic neuroma, pituitary tumours, and salivary gland tumours in adults, or of paediatric brain tumours.”

The WHO authors also said RF radiation from cell towers “likely does not increase the risk of childhood cancer.”

Independent researchers say otherwise

Moskowitz and his co-authors, in their 2020 review of 46 studies, found “significant evidence linking cellular phone use to increased tumor risk, especially among cell phone users with cumulative cell phone use of 1000 or more hours in their lifetime (which corresponds to about 17 min per day over 10 years), and especially among studies that employed high quality methods.”

They recommended further studies be conducted to confirm their findings.

Moskowitz noted that the 2020 review differed in important ways from the WHO’s review. For instance, the 2020 review looked at a different kind of study than the WHO review.

“Our review examined only case-control studies of tumor risk and cellphone use as we did not consider any occupational, cohort or time-trend studies to be of sufficient quality to warrant consideration,” he said.

Also, Moskowitz and his co-authors used different criteria for weeding out studies they thought might be biased.

“Most importantly,” he added, “we employed a more conventional approach to the analysis of the cumulative call time data that examined the effects of heavy cell phone use.”

Conflicts of interest

Moskowitz noted that all of the WHO’s scientific review teams have one or more members from the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP).

ICNIRP, which Moskowitz called a “cartel,” is a German nonprofit that issues RF radiation exposure limits “produced by its own members, their former students and close colleagues.”

The wireless industry favors the ICNIRP limits because they’re designed to protect people only from radiation levels high enough to generate heat — meaning the limits turn a blind eye to the possible health effects from radiation levels lower than those needed to heat human tissue.

Moskowitz explained why it’s problematic for ICNIRP members to conduct the WHO’s reviews:

“In 2019, investigative journalists from eight European countries published 22 articles in major news media that exposed conflicts of interest in this ‘ICNIRP cartel.’ …

“The journalists argue that the cartel promotes the ICNIRP guidelines by conducting biased reviews of the scientific literature that minimize health risks from EMF [electromagnetic field] exposure. …

“By preserving the ICNIRP exposure guidelines favored by industry, the cartel ensures that the cellular industry will continue to fund their research.”

Even though a former ICNIRP member who served as editor-in-chief of the Bioelectromagnetics Society journal accused ICNIRP of “groupthink” in 2021, the WHO continues to promote the ICNIRP’s guidelines, which are similar to those adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in the U.S., Moskowitz explained.

The ICBE-EMF in 2022 published a peer-reviewed paper refuting the “thermal-only paradigm” that insists that harmful biological effects only occur from radiation levels high enough to heat human tissue.

“The preponderance of peer-reviewed research finds non-thermal effects,” Moskowitz said.

In July, Moskowitz and other scientists with ICBE-EMF called for the retraction of an earlier WHO review because it inaccurately concluded that current international limits on RF radiation protect the public from possible non-cancer health impacts from wireless radiation, including migraines, tinnitus and sleep disturbances.