Good morning.
My name is Annie Sasco. I am an MD with doctoral training at Harvard in epidemiology, two master's degrees, and a doctoral degree. I have been working in cancer epidemiology for the last 25 years at the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is part of the World Health Organization.
During that time I saw a doubling of the number of cancer cases in the world, and that led me to question the reason why. I became interested in environmental contaminants, be they physical, as in the case of ionizing or non-ionizing radiation, chemicals, or whatever.
I have been asked by Next-Up to be a witness here today. I think it's important for scientists to sometimes go beyond the mere statistical results and see, if you are interested in prevention, how to push for policies. I think those types of organizations such as Next-Up are very important in doing exactly that.
On the issue of electromagnetic fields specifically, I have been a witness in several centres on that already, including, last year, in the French Senate in front of the Office parlementaire d'évaluation des choix scientifiques et technologiques.
What do we know today about electromagnetic fields? And what I also want to say is, “When do we have enough evidence to take action?”
With regard to electromagnetic fields, we have, of course. more than plenty of evidence of exposure; I think that exposures in the human population have greatly increased in the last 20 years. That's a very recent phenomenon in terms of frequency of exposure of a population from multiple sources; and even if it's a sole source at a low level, there is the possibility, of course, for interaction and for cumulative effects over time, since exposure starts in utero and goes on for a whole lifetime.
So we have evidence that there is ever more frequent exposure and, in fact, soon the problem will be that no one will be unexposed, which will make comparison difficult, and therefore epidemiology difficult.
With regard to biological effects, more will be said by other witnesses, I guess, but there are two groups, thermal and non-thermal, with the issue of potential general toxicity and whether these EMFs have a promoting or an initiating effect for cancer occurrence.
As for experimental studies, there have been too few, in a way, and most of them have been done by industry-funded researchers. There have been very few public studies done with public funds that have looked at the evidence in animals, although with regard to exposure to carcinogens, animals are usually good cancer models and long-term effects models.
Epidemiology is, of course, the most relevant. What do we know just on cellphones and antennas? There have been many studies on cellphones, the largest one being the Interphone study, with several thousand cases and controls, which was done in 13 countries on glioma, meningioma, parotid gland tumours, and also acoustic neurinomas. The final results should be out, I have been told, in the coming days. For the time being, results for several countries are already out, but not yet, to my knowledge, for Canada.
They show somewhat contradictory results, but nevertheless, in several studies or some studies there is a tendency for increased risk for the heaviest users even if that's defined in different ways. And that's exactly what one expects to see. At the beginning, obviously, we are still young, in a way, in regard to exposure in the population, but it could be just the beginning of a more frequent problem in the years to come. The issue of children being particularly sensitive to this exposure has to be underlined, although at this time there is very little data, and more is needed. Similarly, we need more studies with valid protocols to look at issues of actual hypersensitivity.
So do we already have enough to act on it? I think we have a great level of suspicion and already quite a lot of data that goes in that direction. If we want to wait for final proof, at least in terms of cancer, it may take another 20 years, and the issue then will be that we will not have any unexposed population to act as a control.
We may never have the absolute final proof, but if our goal is to reduce somewhat the burden of cancer and other chronic diseases in the years to come, we have enough data to go ahead with a precautionary principle to avoid unnecessary exposure.
Regulations vary a lot across the countries, whereas population does not vary so much, but we can come back to this later.
I thank you for your attention.