At the end of August 2017, there were over 1,186 million wireless telephone subscriptions in India. Alongside growth, public concern on potential adverse health effects of cell phone radiation also grew. Government of India and its agencies such as the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) started addressing these issues more seriously; ICMR extended modest funding to a few institutions to carry out projects on the adverse effects. These studies indicated some adverse effects. Regrettably, there was no critical appraisal of these questionable studies, though ICMR repeatedly asserted that there is no conclusive evidence for any harm.
As studies often appeared in obscure/predatory journals, expert bodies such as International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) mostly ignored them.
A paper in Current Science (December 27, 2017) claimed that mobile phone radiation induced sedation in cockroaches and caused changes in enzyme systems, protein content, total free amino acids.
The researchers used two separate plastic containers of equal size and put 15 healthy male cockroaches in each box. They exposed the test box containing cockroaches to radiation from a mobile phone for 1, 3 and 6 h by a full call (nearly 1 minute) every 5 minutes to the mobile phone that was kept inside the box.
In the April 10, 2018 issue of Current Science, Dr Vijayalaxmi, University of Texas Health Science Center, U.S. listed seven basic weaknesses of the study, which included poor design, lack of positive controls, failure to correlate the changes observed in several tests to their significance in human health and far-fetched exaggeration of observations to warn humans.
She served the working group of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as "possibly carcinogenic" (Group 2 B) as an expert.
She pointed out that in the cockroach-study “there was absolutely no dosimetry giving the actual exposure to electromagnetic radiation in the cockroaches. It is impossible to replicate/confirm these observations by independent researchers using the information presented in the article.”
“Overall, the study on cockroaches provides no useful information for the safety evaluation of EMR exposure because of the several weaknesses mentioned above. It is not possible to draw any meaningful conclusions related to human health and cell phone use to justify the warning,” she added.
Other studies
On March 2, 2015, in response to questions in the Rajya Sabha, ICMR gave a list of 15 papers from ICMR-funded projects. These projects claimed that they found evidence for adverse biological effects.
Apparently, the ICMR ignored IARC's criticism of some of these papers. For instance, the two papers by Gandhi and Singh (2005), Gandhi, and Anita (2005) claimed that they found cytogenetic and genetic damage respectively in mobile phone users.
The IARC monograph 102, an authentic review on the subject, had pointed out “several inconsistencies and weaknesses in laboratory methods, data collection, exposure assessment, etc. in both publications”.
Another ICMR-funded project reported headache, dizziness, numbness in the thigh, and heaviness in the chest among mobile phone users. These are very unusual results! Specialists must examine whether the investigations satisfy the criteria recommended for research studies by the WHO framework for developing health-based EMF standards (2006).
Since a few countries chose guidelines stricter than those recommended by the International Commission for Non Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), a few groups in India demanded country-specific safety guidelines. On 12 February 2014, the 53rd report of the Standing Committee on Information Technology recommended that Government should entrust the scientific study on impact of telecom towers and handsets on humans to a reputed Government organization in a time-bound programme.
An ICMR-led, All India Institute of Medical Sciences-partnered multidisciplinary project is poised “to study the effect of RFR emitted from cell phone on cancer, heart, reproductive organs, ear and brain related problems, if any”. It must be borne in mind that the $25 million, US National Toxicology Project which carried out studies of cell phone radiation on rats and mouse, with precise control over all variables, is yet to produce a conclusive report.
The infinitely complicated, ICMR study is unlikely to offer any actionable inputs to arrive at India-centric guidelines. Since the present guidelines have a safety factor of 500, we need not lose sleep over the potential adverse effects of cell tower/phone radiation.
(The writer is a former secretary of AERB. Email: ksparth@yahoo.co.uk)
