Thursday, October 22, 2009

The Southern Times - poor quality reporting / Ci-joint une invitation personnelle pour participer à un évènement rare au Québec

HI All
 
The link below to The Southern Times, 'The Newspaper for Southern Africa', is to one of the most pitiful cases of bad reporting that I have seen.  The reporter relies on a very poor quality Danish study from 2006.  The main weakness of the study was that over 200,000 of the corporate (highest) users of cell phones were not included in the research.  The newspaper report is one sided, with only information from 'industry' sources.  It completely ignores the well researched adverse health effects of microwave radiation ( www.bioinitiative.org ).  It is shoddy reporting like this that is giving many people a false sense of security and endangering their health.
 
Below the link, is an article published by Powerwatch in December 2006, which explains the serious faults of the 'Danish Study'.
 
Martin Weatherall
 
-----------------------------------------------------
 
http://www.southerntimesafrica.com/article.php?title=Cell%20phones%20do%20not%20raise%20cancer%20risk&id=1629
The Southern Times - South Africa
The phones emit electromagnetic fields that can penetrate into the brain, and some scientists have sought to determine if this could cause cancer or other ...
 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Danish Study found phones prevented cancer

07/12/2006

A large new study from Denmark has found no increase in cancer risk amongst 451,679 users from 1982-1995. Instead, for select cancers, it has found statistically significant decreases in cancer.

http://www.powerwatch.org.uk/news/20061206_danish_phones_cancer.asp

The conclusions and recommendations taken from the paper abstract are as follows:

"In conclusion, we found no increased risk of brain tumors, acoustic neuromas, salivary gland tumors, eye tumors, leukemias or overall cancers in this large, nationwide cohort study of cellular telephone subscribers in Denmark. "

--------------------------------------------

Powerwatch Comments We have some serious issues with a number of aspects of this paper, and believe that due to the setup of the research itself it could not possibly have found an effect even if one was present. On top of this there are certain findings that we find suspiciously likely to be false results.

Firstly, the most obvious problem is how the "regular mobile phone users" are selected. There is no problem in the logic they have used for the 450k people in their study, and we would agree that these people are likely to be regular phone users (that is, if we accept that the level of "regular" should be determined by 1 phone call per week for 6 months). However, they have compared it to the national cancer statistics (without the 450k) as a base, which to be truly accurate would imply that they are comparing it to an effectively "unexposed" group if we are to judge the relative increase in risk.

Looking at the beginning of their "Study and Methods" section, we find that they originally had 723,421 records, taken from all cellular telephone subscriptions during the period 1982-1995. Of these, 102,819 records were excluded because of duplication (change of address for example), leaving 620,602 people in their sample size. They then excluded a further 200,507 subscriptions under the basis that they were "corporate" subscriptions and the actual person using the phone could not be identified. So out of the original recordset, over 30% (which by their own admission may be the "most active users") were excluded. They also ignored all mobile phone users that started their contracts after 1995 (most mobile phone users in the country will now fit into this category) and ignored all non-contract phone usage (pay as you go).

As a result, the reference group will include at least as many (and likely considerably more unless there really is less then 16% of the Danish population that use a mobile phone) mobile phone users as the supposedly exposed group. There will of course be non-users as well, but having this many mobile phone users in the reference group will push the expected OR of such a sample size considerably close to 1.0 (no increased risk) anyway - it is little surprise that that is what they found.

Secondly, they didn't actually find that the phones were having no effect, they found a protective effect for certain types of cancer. Out of the 18 different cancer types examined, it was found that prolonged mobile phone usage actually protected the user from 7 of the categories, and that this protective effect was statistically significant. More interestingly still, these protective effects were found in cancers that would not normally be associated with phone usage (lung cancer, liver cancer, pancreatic cancer for example). Without something to give some indication (either scientifically or logically) that this should be happening, such a large protective effect should be triggering some alarm bells - for example, maybe the "expected" values of cancer rate were too high across the board.

To analyse what the possible outcome of this would be (if true), we adjusted the ORs to get the smoking related cancers as close to 1.0 as possible, and looked at the outcome. To do this we multiplied the OR and the range bounds by 1.27 (not very scientific, as the aim was merely to look for a trend), so that the average of the ORs for lung, pharynx, oesophagus, liver and pancreas were around 1.0 (in fact 1.00076). When we did this we found that a number of cancers became statistically significantly increased, the most prominent of which were brain cancer, leukaemia, bladder cancer, prostate cancer and testicular cancer. Of course, this is entirely non-scientific with regards to accuracy, but it is interesting to see that the increases are in the cancers typically associated with mobile phones (brain, prostate and testicular) - if the latter two are theoretically increased because of the phone sitting on your belt, it is interesting to see that bladder cancer would also make sense as an increase.

This isn't to say that these increases are real, but it strikes us as an extraordinary coincidence that the most commonly accused cancers were the ones with most significant increases after our adjustments - it certainly adds credance to the argument that there may have been something at fault with their reference cancer risk levels.

All in all this appears to be an extremely flawed piece of research, that either by design, incompetence or unavailability of data seemed destined to find no effect from the very beginning.

 
 
 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 
 
Ci-joint une invitation personnelle pour participer à un évènement rare au Québec.  Et oui, tout est en place pour une manifestation contre la pollution électromagnétique et les micro-ondes.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xavvai_nouvelle-rapport-afsset-15-octobre

15 octobre 2009. En France, la principale agence de santé publique ( Afsset) reconnait officiellement des effets sur la santé provoqués des micro-ondes. Au Québec, au même moment l'agence de santé publique du Québec adopte le discours mensongé d'Industrie Canada et décide d'ignorer les personnes affectées par ces micro-ondes.

Ce dossier n'est plus scientifique mais financier et politique.

Aidez-nous à dénoncer les politique canadiennes favorisant les profits des cies de cellulaire au détriment de la santé des citoyens et de leurs enfants.

Venez vous joindre à nous.

Collectif Sauvons nos Enfants des Micro-Ondes - SEMO

p.s. L'émission "Électrosmog" produite par TVBL et MAISON SAINE, diffusée le 15 octobre 2009, est disponible sur le site dangersemo.com

MANIFESTATION POUR DÉNONCER LA POLLUTION ÉLECTROMAGNÉTIQUE CAMOUFLÉE !

Venez vous joindre à nous !

Le 20 octobre 2009.

En septembre 2009, Vidéotron a modifié le sommet du clocher de l'église St-Vital de Montréal-Nord afin d'installer des antennes relais cellulaire et wi-max…une garderie jouxte le terrain de l'église et une école primaireest également située à un coin de rue.

Des citoyens, voisins de l'église, se sont mobilisés et organisent une manifestation,le dimanche 25 octobre 2009 à 13h00 afin de dénoncer cette installationfaite en cachette des habitants du quartier, et de sensibiliser la population en général aux risques importants que présentent ces antennes. Les citoyens réclament le retrait des antennes, au nom du PRINCIPE DE PRÉCAUTION relatif à l'exposition aux micro-ondes. Ce principe est à l'origine des récentes décisions des tribunaux français ordonnant le démantèlement d'antennes situées près des habitations (pour référence : http://www.nextup.org/pdf/Cour_Appel_Versailles_Jugement_Riverains_Antennes_Relais_Contre_Bouygues_Telecom_04_02_2009.pdf)

Après Châteauguay et Terrebonne, il s'agit de la troisième manifestation au Québec organisée par des citoyens contre l'implantation sauvage des antennes relaisau coeur des quartiers résidentiels.

Les antennes doivent être activées dès 2010… il est grand temps d'agir !

Personnes-ressources :

Michelle Boily et Jean Beauregard, Citoyens de Montréal-Nord

michelleetjean@msn.com (514) 327-0413

 ET ,  François Therrien, porte-parole Le collectif SEMO

(450) 471-8371 ftherrien@aei.ca       www.dangersemo.com