Momentum is building in the campaign to try to protect children from harmful smartphone use. Earlier this year, Miriam Cates MP led a lively debate on this subject, while the Education Committee led an inquiry entitled, ‘Screen Time – Impacts on Education and Wellbeing’. The grassroots movement, including Smartphone Free Childhood, Safe Screens and others is gathering pace. The latter organisation is in fact actively supporting MP Josh MacAlister’s Safer Phones Bill launched earlier this month, which aims to “make smartphones less addictive for children and empower families and teachers to cut down on children’s daily smartphone screen time”.
The dangers of smartphone use are clearly serious and encompass addiction, harmful content, exposure to sexual abuse and bullying, disruption of learning, behavioural changes through the habits adopted and the loss of previously normal childhood activities and social interactions. The movement hails Jonathan Haidt as the “world’s leading voice” on the damage caused to children by a phone-based childhood. Haidt identifies the damage as an “adolescent mental health crisis”.
The diagnosis, therefore, is overwhelmingly one of psychological damage. What I find astounding, however, is that with the exception of Safe Screens, no-one has mentioned the effects on children’s health of the wireless radiation signals emitted by smart devices, Wi-Fi or phone masts. All appear to assume that the only issue is the way children interact with screens along with the harmful social media content.
Why are we not hearing the other side of the story? The belief that wireless or radio-frequency radiation (RFR) is safe is promoted in the media too. A case in point is the recent Guardian article about the WHO systematic review concluding that mobile phone use is not linked to cancer, but not mentioning other reviews, which reached the opposite conclusion. A previous Guardian article promoted the view that 5G is safe, though it relied only on the naturally biased statements of telecoms’ chiefs from EE and Vodafone. Another one belittled the problems suffered by those with electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) and in 2019, the BBC Reality Check Team concluded that 5G would be safe, quoting the U.K. Government, the WHO and the International Commission on Non-Ionising Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), whose safety exposure guidelines are followed in the U.K.
Yet, a little longer ago, the risks of wireless radiation were taken more seriously. In 2007, a Panorama programme looked at the health risks of Wi-Fi in schools with electronics expert Alasdair Philips. A Government leaflet from 2011 stated: “The U.K. Chief Medical Officers advise that children and young people under 16 should be encouraged to use mobile phones for essential purposes only, and to keep calls short.” And on another page the Government recommends that “excessive use of mobile phones by children should be discouraged”. This was based on the recommendations of the Stewart Report produced in 2000 by the Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones.
So why has there been no campaign to publicise the risks of mobile phone use and other RFR-emitting devices, especially for children? Instead, the opposite happened: the Government, through the now defunct British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, promoted the use of wireless technologies in schools, so that now there is hardly a school without them. During the lockdown the Government wanted every child to use a laptop, hardly any of which would have been hard-wired via ethernet cables.
Research on specific harms to children from wireless technology had been presented to MPs in December 2017 by Dr. Sarah Starkey, neuroscientist, when she gave evidence to the Early Years Inquiry. She emphasised the fact “that effects are seen in animal studies indicates that the radiofrequency signals themselves can have adverse effects, and it is not just children or young people accessing social media/internet through mobile devices, or time spent looking at screens”. She cited evidence from human and animal studies showing “effects on development during pregnancy, effects on children and young people, on brain development, fertility and increased risk of cancers”. Examples discussed included ADHD, DNA damage, reduced memory and attention and the alteration of electrical brain activity. Why does no-one appear to have heard about this?
Naturally the question arises, “What is actually going on?” Is it possible that only one side of the debate is being presented to the public? If so, why? Or is the issue that we are all in denial about possible harms to health, because none of us can live without our smartphones and so shut our ears to potential issues?
To try to get an answer to these questions, I will consider briefly two recent pieces of research, stating broadly that there is no link between mobile phone use and cancer. One is the large cohort study, Cosmos, and the other a systematic review carried out by the WHO’s EMF project.
The Cosmos interim paper, published in March 2024, concluded, “Our findings to date, together with other available scientific evidence, suggest that mobile phone use is not associated with increased risk of developing these tumours.” However in August 2024 a group of scientists representing the recently formed International Commission on the Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields (ICBE-EMF) published a paper recommending that the Cosmos authors retract their conclusion, due to serious methodological problems.
They also pointed out that: “COSMOS was partially funded by the telecommunications industry in three countries, Finland, Sweden and the United Kingdom and that despite the authors’ claim that a ‘firewall’ agreement ensured ‘complete scientific independence’, the study design was negotiated with Ericsson prior to adoption of this agreement.” Further details of this conflict of interest are detailed by the Swedish Radiation Protection Foundation, which also states that “The study was carried out by researchers with a long tradition of dismissing health risks from mobile phone radiation” and that several of them were members of ICNIRP, a further conflict of interest.
Coming to the WHO systematic review and meta-analysis, published in August this year, this looked at 63 studies and concluded that exposure to wireless radiation (RF) from mobile phones or phone masts is unlikely to cause brain cancer or childhood cancer and that occupational exposure may not cause brain cancer.
Coming to quite a different conclusion, Dr. Joel Moskowitz from the University of California published a similar review in 2020 based on 46 of these studies, which found “significant evidence linking cellular phone use to increased tumour risk”. On his own webpage, Moskowitz lists many concerns about the way the 2024 WHO review was conducted and mentions five other studies from 2016 and 2017, which did show a causal link between mobile phone use and cancer. Since the publication of the WHO review, a South Korean study published this month found “significantly elevated risks for three types of brain tumours when examining tumours on the side of the head where cell phones were held” according to Moskowitz.
It therefore seems absolutely clear that there is no scientific consensus that RFR is safe for human health. But who should we believe? Professor John Frank in his article ‘Electromagnetic fields, 5G and health: what about the precautionary principle?‘ makes it clear that there are wide fluctuations in safety exposure limits put into practice globally and states that the guidelines suggested by ICNIRP are so lax, because ICNIRP members do not believe that damage can occur to human health unless body tissue is heated by RF radiation. This appears to be the main difference between ICNIRP members and the many scientists who say that damage occurs below the heating threshold. ICNIRP is recognised as “an official collaborating non-state actor by the WHO” and membership is by invitation only to the like-minded.
The non-scientist is still left with the problem of which side to believe. The Court of Appeal in Turin, however, made short work of this problem, confirming that there was a causal link between an acoustic neuroma and a worker’s use of the mobile phone, because it decided to give less weight to scientific evidence involving conflicts of interest. The judges wrote in this important judgment: “Indeed, the Tribunal recognises that telephone industry-funded scientists, or members of the ICNIRP, are less reliable than independent scientists.”
I am including a link to the English translation of this judgment, which should be essential reading for anyone interested in the question of whom to trust in this debate.
Returning to the WHO systematic review, Microwave News, run by Dr. Louis Slesin, maintains that the same small interconnected group of people involved in the WHO EMF project, ICNIRP and SCENHIR, have a long history of maintaining the no-risk narrative. He states: “In short, the new (WHO) systematic review is an ICNIRP production.” More detailed information on the conflicts of interest involving ICNIRP and WHO EMF project authors can be found in this 90-page document by two MEPs, the late Michèle Rivasi and Professor Klaus Buchner.
This year, several other WHO systematic reviews have been published and again have been severely criticised with requests for retractions from scientists. The critiques are here (effects on pregnancy and birth outcomes), here (effects on tinnitus etc.) and here (effects on oxidative stress).
I imagine that most people would agree with the Turin Court of Appeal, that conflicts of interest may call into question scientific conclusions and indeed the Physicians’ Health Initiative for Radiation and Environment (PHIRE) has identified ways in which research can be biased or corrupted.
It is, however, still difficult to understand why the media would not give us both sides of the story, especially when so much is at stake. Could it be that there is financial gain for them in supporting the narrative of the telecoms companies and the WHO? Or, I wonder if the recent BBC Panorama programme following youngsters, who had given up their smartphones for a week, can give us a clue? It ended, rather lamely, by asking one of the mothers whether she would support a ban on smartphones for youngsters. She replied that she wouldn’t, as she was on it all the time herself.
In other words, adults would appear to be as addicted as children to their smartphones and cannot imagine life without one. When I reveal that I don’t possess one, people wonder how I manage. Well, usually quite easily. I wait until I get home to go online and am happy not to be distracted by a phone when I am out. It just involves a little extra advance-planning. Because I am aware of the health risks, I use a wired landline and an ethernet-wired computer. I also had my smart meter removed. Luckily, I am semi-retired, as a working environment with the inevitable Wi-Fi would not suit me.
How to use technology in a safer way is one of the topics to be discussed at an important scientific conference next week. Alasdair Philips from the 2007 Panorama programme will answer questions on this topic.
This conference, on November 9th in Forest Row, East Sussex, is entitled, ‘Wireless Radiation: the Elephant in the Classroom’ and will discuss research showing how children’s health is impacted by wireless radiation, as well as highlighting effects on wildlife. Expert international speakers include the American epidemiologist and toxicologist Dr. Devra Davis and U.K.-based expert in electromagnetic hypersensitivity Dr. Erica Mallery-Blythe. In addition, Deborah Fry will relate a personal story. The booking link gives further information.
It is to be hoped that U.K. campaigners seeking to protect children from the negative effects of smartphones will also inform themselves about the effect on health of radio-frequency radiation, just as the recent Macron Commission report on Children and Screens has done. Section 2.1.4 of the report, to be found from p.32 onwards, deals with those effects mentioning tumours, endocrine disruption and cognitive effects among others.
Unless Wes Streeting is about to inaugurate a new era, we can expect the U.K. Government to take no responsibility for this issue. In fact, the committee (COMARE) supposedly reporting (but actually not) to Government on health effects of RFR only has a “watching brief”, which no doubt means accepting the findings of the WHO reviews without question. Is that really good enough for the British people?
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