The Wi-Fi and Mobile Phone Cancer Debate Heats Up

GILLIAN JAMIESON

Your smartphone, your Wi-Fi, your smart meter, your iPad and much else all use radio-frequency radiation (RFR), but do you know what physical effect this is having on your and your family’s health? Where will you find the truth? Although we only ever hear publicly that RFR “should” be safe, a glimpse behind the scenes reveals a raging battle amongst scientists in an attempt to control the narrative.

This struggle comes at a time when the governments of the world are awaiting the forthcoming WHO Environmental Health Criteria monograph, which will pronounce on the health risks or otherwise of exposure to electromagnetic fields including RFR. Even more critical is the upcoming possible reclassification of RFR as a probable cancer risk by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). The stakes could not be higher.

At the centre of this battle are Meike Mevissen on one side and Ken Karipidis on the other. They are the lead authors of two of the 12 systematic reviews commissioned by the WHO EMF Project on the health effects of radio-frequency radiation (RFR). Only one of these 12 reviews was considered by experts from the International Commission on the Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields (ICBE-EMF) to be well-executed, and this was the one by Mevissen et al., which concluded that there is high certainty evidence that RF-EMF exposure increases the incidence of malignant schwannomas (heart tumours) and gliomas (brain tumours) in rats, with moderate certainty evidence of an increased risk of rare tumours in the adrenal glands and in the liver. This RF-EMF is just the same type of radiation that is emitted by your phone and that you hold to your head and keep in your pocket, and that is constantly by your side.

The lead author of this review, Swiss toxicologist Maeve Mevisson, rather startlingly revealed last month in an interview for Infosperber that her team had had to defend itself from interference from the WHO and that the WHO’s expert responsible for systematic reviews had wanted to select the studies to be included, despite the fact that this expert had no experience with animal studies and that her team included the best experts worldwide. The WHO also wanted the team to, “lump all the selected studies together and then look at the average”. “However,” said Mevisson, “there are different study designs, involving different animal species and sexes — which are known to produce different results. Therefore, a methodology that doesn’t take this into account shouldn’t be used.”

She is referring here to the abuse of meta-analysis (statistical analysis), which according to the ICBE-EMF, in its critique of the 12 WHO reviews in Environmental Health, should not have been used in any of them, since the studies used did not meet certain strict criteria, there being too few primary studies and too much variability between them.

Her opinion was backed a few days ago by Dr Igor Belyaev, who said:

Biological responses to RF-EMF exposure are not determined solely by power density or carrier frequency, but may also depend on specific patterns of modulation that convey biologically relevant signal characteristics. Under such conditions, averaging across heterogeneous exposure configurations does not approximate an ‘average effect’, but may instead obscure effects that occur only under specific combinations of physical and biological parameters (Vesterinen et al., 2014).

Mevisson went on to say: “I do know one thing about animal studies. … You can design them in such a way that you find nothing, by creating statistical noise that obscures relevant effects,” adding: “If I’m supposed to proceed like that, I wouldn’t even bother starting.”

She also commented: “Research is very political… we are constantly confronted with the attitude that there cannot be any health risks.” She also stated in the German interview with Infosperger that the population has a right to know about the present state of the research but that her government wanted scientists to state that there were no health effects from RFR.

The IARC has said that every known human carcinogen is carcinogenic in experimental animals when adequately tested. Considering Mevisson’s clear findings for cancer in rats, it is strange that another WHO review, the one by Karipidis et al. finds that any link between RFR and cancer in humans is unlikely. However, his review was strongly criticised by ICBE-EMF and by renowned experts Dr Lennart Hardell and Mona Nilsson, who described the omissions, inconsistencies and methodological flaws in detail. Karipidis responded to the ICBE-EMF critique last year and then last month criticised the Mevissen et al. review for not using meta-analysis. Mevissen has already responded to this criticism, defending her review, subsequently being supported by Dr Belyaev (as already mentioned) in further correspondence.

Staying with the Karipidis et al. review, its inclusion of a shockingly poor study, the Danish cohort study, is hard to comprehend. Although the Danish study had been dismissed many years before by the IARC as uninformative regarding cancer risks due to “considerable misclassification in exposure assessment”, it was given a strong weighting by Karipidis and team. The inclusion of the Danish study was extensively discussed by Hardell and Nilsson in an article earlier this year and is also mentioned in the ICBE-EMF critique. The division of exposed and unexposed control groups seems nonsensical. Only private mobile phone subscribers in Denmark between 1982 and 1995 were included in the exposed group, excluding the group most likely to be exposed, which consisted of 200,507 corporate mobile phone users. Users with mobile phone subscriptions after 1995 were treated as unexposed; all users of cordless (DECT) phones were treated as unexposed although they were exposed to a similar level of RFR to that of mobile phone users. In addition, actual exposure data were unknown and no analysis of laterality (the side where the phone was held in relation to the position of the tumour) was performed.

The errors in this study were so serious that others reviewers commented, “After reviewing the four publications on the Danish cohort study, one might rightly wonder whether this cohort was initially set up to show no increased risk.” And Professor Michael Kundi of the Medical University of Vienna described the Danish cohort study as “the most severely biased study among all studies published so far”. Could its partial funding by telecoms be to blame?

Why would a lead author (Karipidis) give such a study a heavy weighting in his final analysis? Hardell and Nilsson are in no doubt. Amongst the authors of the WHO reviews there is a serious problem of conflicts of interest, with some authors known to have received funding from the telecommunications industry and with many authors also being on the board of the International Commission on Non-Ionising Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), the self-selecting group which sets exposure safety guidelines but which refuses to accept that health damage can occur unless body tissue is heated and emphatically denies long-term effects such as cancer. Indeed, the leader of the WHO EMF Project, Emilie van Deventer, is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which has long prioritised international lobbying efforts aimed at the WHO.

A further glimpse behind the scenes, confirming dubious methodology, is provided by Dr Moskowitz in his blog entry for April 24th 2025 (please scroll down), when he describes his extremely frustrating experience of participating as a peer-reviewer in one of these WHO systematic reviews. He said:

By design, this [systematic review] excluded most of the relevant research; hence, its conclusion is very limited in scope. Although the authors complied with some of the reviewers’ suggestions, the authors refused to deviate from several problematic decisions made in their protocol paper which was published several years earlier. After two revisions, the special issue editor allowed a critically flawed SR paper to be published in the journal.

I am now left wondering if the WHO interfered with all the reviews, succeeding where they failed with the Mevissen et al. review. The fact that the other 11 reviews were considered methodologically flawed by the ICBE-EMF supports this viewpoint as does the fact that the other 11 reviews all inappropriately employed meta-analysis, most of them downplaying any health risks. It is remarkable that Mevisson was able to stand her ground against this pressure and produce a narrative, rather than statistical review, thus not skewing the conclusions.

The battlelines on the health effects of RFR have been drawn for some time and recently I attempted to give a brief resumé of the two camps and their stances in an article in the Conservative Woman, while for HART I summarised ICBE-EMF’s main criticisms of the 12 WHO reviews. The issue is not only the long-term risks of cancer, oxidative stress, DNA damage, cardiomyopathy, sperm damage and neurological effects, but also the growing number of people who experience the short-term effect of electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS), meaning that they develop symptoms almost immediately after exposure to RFR and are forced to avoid it, something that is almost impossible nowadays.

What irks me is that only one side in this battle seems to succeed in getting publicity in mainstream publications, and that is the side which hopes to convince us that RFR is safe. For example, in the Guardian last year Ken Karipidis was quoted as saying “concerns around links between cancer and mobile phones should be put to rest”.  Where are the articles on the scientific flaws of the WHO reviews or even on the exceptional review by Mevissen et al.? Those who maintain that there is scientific consensus are quite simply wrong. The scientific opposition to the mainstream ‘no harm’ narrative has assembled at the International Commission of the Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields (ICBE-EMF) and this multi-disciplinary expert group deserves to be heard.

Because of my personal experience of RFR my concerns will never be put to rest, as Dr Karipidis would like. I recommend to the reader my recent submission to the Department of Health and Social Care facilitated by my MP, describing this experience and what happened to my neighbours.

If, as I and many others believe, RFR harms health, then we, the public, need to start doing something about it now instead of waiting in vain for regulators to resolve this issue in a scientifically plausible way. Those of us who are affected try to practice avoidance, but this needs to be facilitated by society. I heard recently that a group of private schools had begun taking avoidance measures, such as hard-wiring the internet instead of using Wi-Fi. They had been inspired by Dr Erica Mallery-Blythe, a UK expert on the effect of non-ionising radiation on vulnerable groups such as children and those with EHS. I highly recommend her lecture, which summarises the science and talks about practical measures to reduce EMF exposure.

I urge individuals, doctors, politicians, schools and even local planning authorities to inform themselves and to take action now. We cannot, as in the case of asbestos, afford to wait for 100 years after the first warning, before taking steps to prevent damage to an entire generation. Here are a few places to start:

• Lists of scientific studies at Bioinitiative.org
• News, science and resources at the Environmental Health Trust
• Science, including on EHS and news of related court cases, at PHIRE
• Scientific papers at ICBE-EMF
• News of scientific controversy and cover-ups at Microwave News
• For those objecting to telecoms mast applications, advice is available at RF-Info (and see the Castle Point Plan, pages 154-155)

We all need to take responsibility for educating ourselves, since those who control the narrative appear to be unconcerned about potential health risks and seek to obscure any evidence.

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This article (The Wi-Fi and Mobile Phone Cancer Debate Heats Up) was created and published by The Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Gillian Jamieson

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