10th July 2024
From the journal Reviews on Environmental Health
https://doi.org/10.1515/reveh-2024-0089
Abstract
We examined one of the first published of the several systematic reviews being part of WHO’s renewed initiative to assess the evidence of associations between man-made radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation (RF-EMF) and adverse health effects in humans. The examined review addresses experimental studies of pregnancy and birth outcomes in non-human mammals. The review claims that the analyzed data did not provide conclusions certain enough to inform decisions at a regulatory level. Our objective was to assess the quality of this systematic review and evaluate the relevance of its conclusions to pregnant women and their offspring. The quality and relevance were checked on the review’s own premises: e.g., we did not question the selection of papers, nor the chosen statistical methods. While the WHO systematic review presents itself as thorough, scientific, and relevant to human health, we identified numerous issues rendering the WHO review irrelevant and severely flawed. All flaws found skew the results in support of the review’s conclusion that there is no conclusive evidence for nonthermal effects. We show that the underlying data, when relevant studies are cited correctly, support the opposite conclusion: There are clear indications of detrimental nonthermal effects from RF-EMF exposure. The many identified flaws uncover a pattern of systematic skewedness aiming for uncertainty hidden behind complex scientific rigor. The skewed methodology and low quality of this review is highly concerning, as it threatens to undermine the trustworthiness and professionalism of the WHO in the area of human health hazards from man-made RF-EMF.
Introduction
In this paper, we present a thorough analysis of the quality, validity and conclusion of the first report of a series of reviews from a renewed World Health Organization (WHO) initiative to assess the evidence of associations between (human made) radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation (RF-EMF) and adverse health effects in the general and working population. This initiative will publish several reports in “the Environmental Health Criteria (EHC) series”. The report we analyzed [1], is the first in the row, hereinafter ‘EHC2023’, published in August 2023. A companion protocol was published in 2021 [2], below just termed “the protocol”. A monograph summing up the results of these EHC reports on individual adverse effects is planned as an update of the 1993 WHO monograph on radiofrequency fields [3].
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READ FULL PAPER HERE https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/reveh-2024-0089/html
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