Extracts from Transcript of Telephone Press Conference given by Dr. John Bucher, 2 February 2018
...
Maggie Fox (NBC): I’m wondering if you can characterize
if there’s much new that you’ve learned since 2016. I remember the last time we
asked you if you in particular had changed your cellphone use and I would like
to ask you that again. Have you changed your cellphone use or what you
recommend to your family based on these findings? Thanks.
John
Bucher: So in finishing these studies, we have evaluated the entirety of the
tissues. We have come up with a number of what we were terming equivocal findings
but in general, the only positive finding that we’d really been able to have
confidence in I think is the malignant schwannomas in the heart, which is what
we described in the 2016 report. I think that it’s important to be able to put
all of the content or all of the findings in the report in the context of
understanding what happened across the entire body of animals throughout the
experiment. So we’ve done that. We’re reasonably sure we understand what’s
going on in these studies at this point and the reports that you can see on the
web outline the full findings. That said, I think that the reports don’t go
much further than what we have reported earlier and I have not changed the way
I use the cellphone, no.
Ryan
Knutson (Wall Street Journal): Great. Thanks. Just quickly, just a follow up on that previous
reporter’s question. Did you recommend anything for your family whether that’s
change...
John
Bucher: So the first question was have I recommended changes to my children?
No, I have not recommended changes to my children in the way that you…
Ryan
Knutson: Changes like tell them to use the headset or anything like that or
just you don’t tell them to do anything?
John Bucher: I have not really
addressed that issue with them.
Todd
Shields (Bloomberg) : I’m interested in the take away for people/for
humans. Do people need to be afraid of their cellphones? What should we say to
the man on the street?
John
Bucher: So as I indicated before, the typical cellphone has radio frequency
radiation emissions that are very, very, very, very much lower than what we
studied. We studied, as I indicated, the maximum that one could achieve during
a call in a poor connection situation and we studied it over nine hours a day
for over two years. So this is a situation obviously that people are not going
to be encountering when utilizing cellphones but again, it’s a situation that
allows us to express potential biological events or find potential biological
events if one is going to occur. So I think that the message is that typical cellphone
use is not going to be involved, is not going to be directly related to the
kind of exposures that we use in these studies.
Brenda
Goodman (WebMD): I know this is going to be difficult because there have been
so many different studies but can you put these findings into context a little
bit for us of other major cellphone studies like interphone? How do we assess
all this information taken together? Are you telling us really we have to
consider this as its own discrete piece of information?
John Bucher: No,
actually I’m saying that this is part of a much larger set of information that
has to be considered with respect to determining risk to human health. The
interphone studies and a number of other earlier epidemiology studies still
have produced conflicting evidence as to whether there are increases in brain
tumors as well as tumors called acoustic neuromas or vestibular schwannomas of
the 8 th cranial nerve in humans using cellphones in a very heavy rate. One of
the things that we found most interesting about our findings was that the
malignant schwannomas, even though they occurred in the heart and not in the
head of these animals, were in fact schwannomas and schwannomas are the same
type of tumor that’s found on the acoustic nerve in humans in the earlier
epidemiology studies. So I’m not saying that our studies should be taken only
in isolation in effect. I think that as I indicated in my remarks, we need to
take into consideration the entirety of the epidemiology literature. You need
to take into consideration the number of animal studies that have been done in
the past and they number almost 20 now - animal studies of cellphone radiation with the vast majority of them coming up negative
with respect to cancer. We have, in the report, pointed out a number of the
technical difficulties with some of those earlier studies that actually led us
to do the study we’re reporting today because of what we felt were some
technical improvements that we can make in the study designs. But again, I
think that absolutely one needs to take into consideration all evidence before
reaching conclusions about public health implications over a study.
Todd
Shields (Bloomberg): I’m told by a reporter who
knows more about this stuff than I do to ask was the increase in malignant
schwannoma in rats statistically significant?
John Bucher: Yes, it was. By
trend test in one case and pair-wise as well as trend in the other.
Todd
Shields: Okay, and if I could have a quick follow up. In the news release you
say you caution against drawing/extrapolating to humans but then you also say
the following, “We know however the tumors we saw on these studies are similar to tumors previously reported in some studies of
frequent cellphone users.” So do they buttress these earlier reports of tumors
in cellphone users and doesn't that say we should indeed draw a link to human
cautions? I’m a little confused by the direction of that.
John Bucher: The
association - I mean one of the things that drew our attention to this
particular tumor type was the earlier reports of schwannomas and I indicated
that. There has been sort of an evolution I think in the way cellphones are
used and in the technologies, I think that they’re moving more and more towards
lower power exposures, lower power exposures to humans. One of the big pushes
is to prevent the rapid battery decline that happens in a high power situation
from cellphone. So I think the technologies are really moving us away from some
of the exposures that would’ve been happening when they were moving from the 2G
especially the 1G, the analog systems to the 2G/early 2G systems where there
were fewer base stations or base towers and potentially higher phone powers
being used at that time
Ed Friedman
(Friends of Merrymeeting Bay): A few quick questions. You said that
this is an unlikely exposure that these test animals have underwent. On the
other hand, clearly there’s a great deal of ambient exposure that people have
beyond just being glued to a cellphone. Can you relate one to the other i.e.
does the period of exposure time with your test animals maybe compensate
somewhat for the other exposures that people receive? ...
Michael Wyde (NTP scientist): So in
answer to your first question, we’re kind of living in this wireless
environment where we’re exposed to wifi and cellphone radio frequency radiation
and electromagnetic fields. The way that I understand it is that the exposure
from the cell towers themselves is negligible unless you’re very close or
working on those particular towers. So primarily human exposure is through use
of handsets that you use, the wireless communications technologies that we
researched.
Ed Friedman: Okay. Thank you. Of course people have smart meters
and tablets and all these other things that are fairly close.
Michael
Wyde: Right. So that’s one of the concerns and so our research, depending on
what types of frequency use and modulation used, these studies would be
[unintelligible] one of those technologies and again, we’re not experts on the
exposure side but it’s my understanding from discussing with experts that the
exposures are rather minimal from these other sources but again, these are
sources of exposure and those need to be further investigated.
John
Bucher: So I’d like to add to that. One of the things that you mentioned is
that there are different frequencies used in different technologies and we
acknowledge that. One of the things that I think will come to of these studies
that’s a great advantage to us is that we, through continuing some of these
molecular studies into the tissues of these animals and knowing what happens
with the particular frequencies and modulations that we’ve used, we can design
short term studies to be much more flexible and try to keep up with the
changing technologies, by monitoring some of the molecular changes that we’ve
seen in these studies, in newer studies, and hopefully we’ll be able to do
something about keeping up with the rapidly advancing technologies with respect
to assuring cellphone safety in the future.
Melissa
Chalmers (Epic): You mentioned about the exposure in rats and
mice not being typical for regular exposure people have during the day. I was
just a little concerned about that just because there are many people that
don't realize that they are increasing their exposures by doing things like
making a cellphone call from inside a metal building or their basement or in a
moving car. Then on top of that, there are a great many people who don’t know
what the distances that these phones need to be from their body or their head
and they don’t look in their user manual and they exceed the safety code
recommendation for their phone. So I just didn’t want people going away with
thinking that they’re not usually actually getting to these levels that
would’ve been experienced in your study.
John Bucher: Well, we’ve tried to
indicate what those levels are so that the community can evaluate this
information and put it in the context of everyday use. I think that when we
started these studies, there were not great measurements in the literature of
sort of the ambient exposure level and we’re hoping that we actually believe
that some of that work is being done. So we’ll have more of a database on which
to put these studies into context moving forward.
Melissa
Chalmers: Okay. Thanks. I was just concerned because there were a couple of
people from the media that had called in and were trying to get a firm answer
as to whether or not it’s safe or not and how this relates to the world and
most people don’t realize what they phones are doing. They’ve never measured
them or done anything with them to know. So with my experience with helping people
who are having problems with this technology, often nobody realizes the
exposures were as high as they were until afterwards. So thank you very
much.
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