Australian scientist have hit out at claims made on the ABC “Catalyst” program that mobile phones and Wi-Fi are linked to causing cancer.

But new claims made during the ABC’s flagship science program, Catalyst, that Wi-Fi enabled devices could be causing cancer much faster than we think, has sparked controversy.

Some of Australia’s leading authorities on electromagnetic energy and preventive medicine have hit out at the half-hour program saying the assumptions made by some of the experts were views that were“not supported by science”.

The program, Wi-Fried?, featured the opinions of a number of prominent international health and radiation experts, who question the current data that basically says our devices are not causing any harm.

Former Clinton administration health and disease prevention adviser Dr Devra Davis told the program that for many years she believed mobile phones were harmless but began questioning the science behind this belief several years ago.

Now she believes they are carcinogenic.

“My colleagues and I since then, some of whom have worked at the World Health Organisation with me in the past, have just published an article saying mobile phone radiation is a probable human carcinogen with newer studies showing that people who begin to use cell phones regularly and heavily as teenagers have four to eight times more malignant glioma — that’s a brain tumour — 10 years later,” the US cancer epidemiologist says in the program. “The Interphone study was carried out from 2000-2004.

“The results were supposed to be released in 2005. It took five years to release the results of the Interphone study, and it was not because the science wasn’t clear, it was because of the intense politics that took place between members of the team, some of whom had been heavily sponsored by industry, and others of whom were more independent.

“The bulk of the study said the results were inconclusive. The actual findings, in technical appendix 2, showed there was a significantly increased risk of brain cancer in the heaviest users.”

Could our phones be killing us?Source:News Limited

It is this claim that has angered local scientists.

Professor Rodney Croft, director of the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia’s Centre for Research Excellence in Electromagnetic Energy, disputed Dr Davis’s assessment.

“I was particularly disappointed to see Wi-Fried air yesterday in the guise of science journalism, and felt it important to reassure other viewers that the fringe position provided by Dr Davis and associates is merely that, a fringe position that is not supported by science,” he said.

“There is very strong scientific consensus that, even after considering such personal views as Dr Davis’, there is no substantiated evidence that the low levels of radio-frequency emissions encountered by mobile telecommunications can cause any harm.

“Of course it is impossible for science to demonstrate that anything is absolutely safe, and so regardless of whether we’re talking about Wi-Fi or orange juice, science cannot demonstrate absolute safety.

“However, given that radiofrequency emissions are one of the most heavily researched agents that science has ever assessed, and given that (contrary to Catalyst’s claims) no substantiated health effects have emerged, we can be very confident that the emissions are indeed safe.”

Dr Geza Benke, a senior research fellow in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University, also hit out at Dr Davis’s claims.

“During the program, Prof Davis claims that the Australian brain cancer incidence rates cannot be used as evidence of no problem because brain cancer latency is 40 years. This firstly contradicts her own argument then, because she spends a lot of time saying current studies are showing increased cancer risk,” he said. “Secondly, Prof Davis’s claims are incorrect, since solid tumours have a much shorter minimum latency.

“This means we should be seeing increased rates now if there was an association. This reference also contradicts her claims that there are no environmental tumours that occur before 10 years.”

But it was not just Dr Davis’s claims that sparked debate, it was also the concerns raised by those in the tech industry.

“I’ve been in the technology industry all my career and I’ve seen the tremendous benefits that technology can provide,” Canada’s former head of Microsoft, Frank Clegg, told the program. “My concern is nobody can say that it’s safe. All my industry and all government agencies say is there is no proof of harm. To my mind, that’s not the same as saying it’s safe.

“Unfortunately, the safety standards in North America and Australia are based on this theory that’s many decades old that if tissue doesn’t get heated, then it can’t cause harm.

“That’s just out of date, and what the biologists tell us and have shown in many experiments, and again, peer-reviewed published papers, that there is damage done at the DNA level, and from a biological standpoint, non-thermal radiation can cause and does cause harm to humans.

“We know that in China, Italy and Switzerland and Russia have standards 100 times safer than Canada’s standards, and that’s the same as Australia’s standards.

“Any government agency, in my opinion, that has done a review in the last two or three years and hasn’t made a significant change to their safety standard has not done a proper thorough review of the science.

“If you think back to what happened in the last decade, the smartphone was launched, Wi-Fi was not available 12 years ago, so any government agency that claims their standards that are a decade old are current is out of date.”

Dr Ken Karipidis from ARPANSA, Australia’s radiation protections agency, told the program it published the national standards in 2002 but conducted a review in 2014.

“The review actually found that the limits of the standards still provide adequate protection from the known health effects of radiofrequency energy,” he said.

Dr Karipidis also told the program the agency had examined the brain tumour rates for the past 30 years and found they had remained quite stable.

“The biggest single exposure that a person gets is through their mobile or cordless phone use. There is some epidemiological evidence of a possible association between prolonged mobile phone use and certain brain tumours,” he said. “That evidence is not good enough to say mobile phones do cause cancer, but the possibility remains, so there is merit for those that are concerned in reducing your exposure to mobile phone use against the head, and in fact will provide advice in doing that by using your hands-free kit or putting the phone on speaker mode or various other ways.

“When it comes to children, there’s not enough evidence in this area, so our recommendation is slightly stronger. We do recommend that parents limit their children’s mobile phone use.”