Evidence of meeting #54 for Health in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was studies.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Chief, Health Effects and Assessments Division, Healthy Environments and Consumer Safety Branch, Department of Health
Which study were you referring to, sir?
Conservative
Terence Young Conservative Oakville, ON
I think it's called the Lawson study, a study out of.... Maybe I have the wrong one. It was a study done out of Sweden. There has been more than one showing increased risk of brain cancer—glioma—and of the auditory nerve on the side of the head on which people use cellphones, after long-term use.
Chief, Health Effects and Assessments Division, Healthy Environments and Consumer Safety Branch, Department of Health
The International Agency for Research on Cancer in 2010 and 2011 did a study on this. I was actually a member of that panel. We looked at all of the data. There were epidemiologists, there were medical doctors, there were people who specialized in animal studies and in vitro studies looking at all the various lines of evidence to determine the scientific basis for a potential cancer risk with RF fields.
Conservative
Terence Young Conservative Oakville, ON
Thanks. I'd like to try to get one more question in. I know where you're heading with this. I appreciate it. Thank you.
We know that EMR can enter a human brain to a depth from four to five centimetres, and of course a child's head is only 10 centimetres when they're very young, so the EMR is going right through their head. If there is a baby monitor next to their bed, it's at the same frequency or close to the same frequency as a microwave oven for maybe eight hours a night.
Have you ever done any studies that demonstrate that this is harmless to infants? Have you ever done any studies, or do you know of any?
Chief, Health Effects and Assessments Division, Healthy Environments and Consumer Safety Branch, Department of Health
I think it's important to point out that you can never prove that something is safe or that something will never happen. We're subject to the evidence base we have at this time. The IARC committee looked at that evidence. Basically, there were studies that found effects and studies that didn't find effects. Many animal and in vitro studies were looked at. Based on this examination, they made a recommendation that it be classified 2B, as possibly carcinogenic to humans. That recommendation acknowledged that there was some credible evidence suggesting that there might be a risk in the long term, but that it was impossible to make a causal association at this time.
Conservative
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ben Lobb
Mr. Young, you're well over time.
Ms. Sellah, we have time for a brief question.
NDP
Djaouida Sellah NDP Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC
Okay, I have a brief question.
I would first like to thank the witnesses for coming here to shed some light on this issue, which I assume will never be resolved with the way things are going.
I am puzzled by the table I am looking at. It provides the radiofrequency exposure limits in different countries. I know that Health Canada has made some efforts from 2009 to 2015, but let's compare our data with Russia's, a large country like ours. For example, how do you explain that, for a frequency of 900 MHz, the threshold is 0.10 W/m2 in Russia, but it is 2.7 W/m2 in Canada? Could you give us more information on that data?
Director General, Environmental and Radiation Health Sciences Directorate, Department of Health
I think it is difficult to explain why other countries have set such low thresholds. However, as previously mentioned, we think that those thresholds are not scientifically justified. Moreover, as it was also mentioned, the limits in some cases apply to a single cellphone tower. They generally don't apply to all radiofrequency-emitting infrastructure. So it is really difficult to explain other countries' data, but we are confident that the thresholds established in Safety Code 6 are adequate.
Conservative
Conservative
Wladyslaw Lizon Conservative Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON
Mr. Chair, while you release the panel, I would ask whether Mr. Adams could provide to the committee the information that Mr. Young was asking for, that is, on what basis were the 140 studies, or all of the studies, accepted or rejected.
I think the committee has the right to know on what basis that work was done and how it was done. If they can provide it in written form, we would probably need it for the study.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ben Lobb
Thank you.
It's 4:40, and we're going to suspend. We're going to come back. We're going to excuse these guests and bring some new ones in, and then we'll start back up.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ben Lobb
We're back in session. We are tight for time, so we want to make sure we give everybody a fair chance.
We have two guests appearing in the second portion of our meeting, Dr. Meg Sears and Professor Martin Blank.
They each have prepared statements as far as I know, so we'll have Dr. Sears go first, and then Professor Blank can go after.
Go ahead.
Dr. Meg Sears Adjunct Investigator, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, As an Individual
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the panel. I'm very grateful for this opportunity today.
I apologize for not providing bilingual materials, but I received my invitation just a week ago, so the timing didn't work out to take advantage of your translation services.
My name is Margaret Sears. I am here as someone with some knowledge on the subject matter—a very limited knowledge on the subject matter—but more importantly, as a scientist interested in environmental health as well as methodology in this field.
I am inspired by working with Dr. David Moher's research group here in Ottawa at the Ottawa Hospital. He is among the world's premier methodologists in clinical epidemiology, a highly respected and influential scientist. I also work in environmental health, was funded as a principal investigator for a Canadian Institutes of Health Research project. I'm associated with research institutes at both CHEO and the Ottawa Hospital, and have worked with Canadian medical specialists in environmental health preparing reports for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the Canadian Transportation Authority, the Alberta Energy Regulator, and others. I have been a guest editor for peer-reviewed medical journals and have co-authored several systematic reviews. That's enough about me.
Regarding Safety Code 6, I made submissions to the Royal Society of Canada and to Health Canada, and Dr. Moher and I also attended a meeting on September 19 with Mr. Adams, Dr. McNamee, and Ms. Bellier.
I also recently responded to the World Health Organization during consultations on their review of health effects of radio frequency radiation. I'll briefly answer one of the questions about that. That consultation document is only partially done. There were no conclusions associated with it, and according to the method section, the literature search ended in 2011, so it's far from complete. So it is nothing that we could be basing anything on at this stage. And it also had no tables of evidence or anything like that in it.
In short, I see major problems with the reporting of these studies, which should reflect on the execution of these reviews. If a review is not well conducted, it is subject to bias and incorrect conclusions.
Last year, the prominent medical journal, The Lancet, published a series of articles on waste in research that was not adequately conducted or reported. It is a big problem, wasting a lot of money on badly conducted and badly reported research.
You have been provided a paper by Rooney et al describing the most recent methodology for systematic reviews in environmental health. The reviews of health and frequencies covered by Safety Code 6 that I have examined, including many of the authoritative reviews relied upon by Health Canada, are lacking salient features of systematic reviews, as summarized in the chart you have been provided. They have also captured but a fraction of the literature, according to what's referenced, with organizations referring to the validity of one another's reviews.
On the other hand, I have a sample of one of the systematic reviews that I co-authored. It's on the relatively narrow topic of dietary supplements and cardiovascular drugs. This is a concern for a much smaller segment of the population than radio frequency radiation that we're all exposed to, but we started from scratch because there was no good review to base it upon, and initially we screened over 33,000 records. There are methods and software established to handle this kind of volume of literature. In a 2012 presentation, it was stated by Pascale Bellier that Health Canada has reviewed 50 years of research. Canadians are waiting to see this evidence because it is not evident to date.
Systematic reviews address specific questions, not really general questions so much, so you have to parse your question to be able to tackle it with really good methodology. They are collaborative. They're transparent. Certainly these processes with Health Canada leave a lot to be desired. Systematic reviews address ingrained biases.
You can only build upon previous reviews that are of high quality. Without previous high-quality reviews to build upon, we have to go back to that 50 years of data. What we have currently is a bit like that telephone game in which messages get mixed up as they're half-heard while they are whispered to one another around the table.
I also believe that there's good reason for concern in this field. Safety Code 6 is said to protect against “established” health effects. What does it take to establish a health effect? Sometimes that hurdle is very high, and there's a somewhat arbitrary bar, because people are.... We'll talk about that in a minute, but keep in mind that every time you hear “established health effects”, there is the question, what does it take to establish a health effect?
I'll give you a couple of examples of research. In the slides that were distributed to you, there is a table with cancer studies. The clearest research originates from Hardell's group in Sweden, comparing phone use between people who had brain tumours and healthy individuals; this is called a case-control study. In Sweden, the background rate of glioma is, I believe, lower than in Canada. We do not properly capture details of brain tumour incidence in Canada, although a database is being set up.
Higher risks, up to fourfold increases, were seen in Sweden with use of wireless phones, both cellphones and cordless phones. The risk of a tumour on the side of the head the phone was held against increases when use begins earlier in life, so children and adolescents are at greater risk, with longer cumulative time on the phone and more years of use. But only part of this information was referenced by the Royal Society of Canada.
The Interphone Study was referenced. This was an enormous study extending over 13 countries, and the diversity of health status and co-exposures really muddied the waters in this study. For example, in some countries, having a phone was a symbol of wealth and was associated with a healthier diet and a cleaner environment. Initial analyses showed that cellphones protect you from cancer, which even the author said was a completely implausible effect, and it was because of this confounding. Further analysis did show higher tumour incidence with phone use.
These two human studies were key in the IARC determination that cellphones possibly cause cancer. But since then, the French CERENAT study was published in 2014. It was not referenced in any of the documents from Health Canada or the Royal Society. It is similar to the Hardell studies. When the analyses were performed in the same manner, the results were basically replicated. So now we have that replication, and such replication is key to becoming an established health effect.
Another concern relating to cancer is women who carry their phones in their bras. Phones are sending signals constantly to keep in touch with a network, even when you're not talking. The first case was reported in 2009, in a keen cell phone user who stored her phone in her bra for 10 years. Cases are piling up of characteristic tumours in young women with no known genetic predisposition. This information also was not taken into account, as far as we know. Maybe it was, but it was certainly not documented that it was taken into account.
Now, if women carry phones in their bras, men carry a lot of phones in their pockets. In Canada, we have some problem with infertility. This is one of many studies showing effects on sperm—there is a graph in your handout. When exposed to typical radiation from phones in pockets, sperm stop swimming, their DNA is damaged, and they die.
What we see in people is backed up by much other research into cells and animals. A lot of the recent research demonstrating potential harm was omitted from reports that supported Safety Code 6, as was discussed previously.
I should say that in the comments regarding the ability to assign a dose to an exposure, what happens in this research is that, if animals are merely exposed to a phone.... With a phone, it's hard to say that the exposure is precisely such and such a number, but it's status quo. But these status quo phone exposure studies are discarded. There's a huge body of evidence that is discarded just because they used a phone instead of something that was more “scientific”.
In summary, I'd offer three recommendations.
First, Health Canada must systematically access, assess, and act upon all the science from scratch. It needs specific tools as well as methodological and library expertise to accomplish this.
Second, we have to open our eyes and collect this environmental health data, both exposures and health outcomes. On that, I would note that the regular compliance data that Industry Canada is accumulating should be made public, so that if a doctor is concerned, he has that data to connect the dots.
We also have to be collecting really good, detailed cancer incidence data. We used to collect that, but it's not available any more. The Public Health Agency of Canada has some data on their website. It used to be reported in small areas, but now it's only reported at the provincial level.
Conservative
Adjunct Investigator, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, As an Individual
Okay.
There is rapidly escalating exposure. I don't think we can really wait any longer to take good action because the status quo is too much. We should move to minimize exposure while we carry out more research.
Thank you very much.
Professor Martin Blank Special Lecturer, Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics, Columbia University, As an Individual
I must apologize. I thought I would be able to refer to the slides. You have the slides in front of you; I will just mention them as we go along.
Thank you for the invitation. You have my credentials on the first slide. I've been in the research business for a long time in the department of physiology at Columbia University. I've been active in connection with this committee as well.
Basically, my first slide says that Safety Code 6 standards are not protective, with the “not” underlined.
What I'll try and do in the next few minutes is tell you why I think they're not protective.
In a nutshell, they are not measuring the right parameters. If you want to measure something, you have to measure something biological. Measuring the temperature is not a biological measurement, although you can measure the temperature of biological materials. You want to be able to measure biological parameters in order to assess biological function.
In the second slide, I comment on the 140 studies that were omitted. The fact is that these were omitted through an evaluation by non-biologists. For example, there are two studies that were published by Dr. Goodman and me that are referred to very frequently. They reveal the fact that stress proteins are activated by electromagnetic fields. We conducted studies mainly in the ELF range but also in the RF range, both of which were omitted despite having been verified and replicated by others.
In the third slide, I mention the number of biological effects that could be—
Conservative
Wladyslaw Lizon Conservative Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON
Which slide did you refer to for the studies?
Prof. Martin Blank
I'm on the third slide now, which shows a quote from a paper by two of the authors of the report, Foster and Moulder, who say that the “only unequivocal mechanism for bioeffects” of radio frequency is the “heating of tissue”. This just makes no sense at all to a biologist.
As I said, you can measure the temperature of anything, but it doesn't give you insight into biological function. Yes, a doctor will ask you if you have a temperature to see if you have an infection, for example, but that doesn't give you a clue as to how biological function is going on.
There's a list on that same slide of a number of biological parameters that have been established as being affected by EMF exposure. It includes, if you notice, one about enzyme acceleration.
This is the work we did with some of the very basic enzymes involved in cell function, such as the sodium-potassium ATPase, which set ups the ion gradients that are responsible for nerve function, and cytochrome oxidase, which is the basic reaction that generates the ATP that drives all our cells. These are affected and have been shown to be affected in the ELF range, but I haven't studied them in the other range as well.
All of these basic functions are affected by the EMF.
In the fourth slide, I refer to the cellular stress response. This is a cell reaction to environmental dangers. If you ask a cell if it is in trouble and you measure these stress proteins, you're going to get a yes answer, because the stress proteins are generated when there's trouble. That's not the kind of trouble that we read about in the newspapers, but things like heat shock, which means the temperature is going above and/or below the range. There's a heat part and also a cooling part, and you get a reaction of stress proteins generated by this cell. Changes in osmotic pressure will generate stress proteins, as will acidity, the changes in pH. These are the basic parameters that a cell will react to.
If you look at the next slide about the natural safety mechanism, you'll see that this is the mechanism that I refer to. It protects the body by activating DNA in a particular region. If you look at the sixth slide, the next one with the picture, you'll see that it shows what the DNA looks like. There's a diagram of a chromosome that I pull apart. In other words, you tear it apart and you see what it's actually composed of. Everybody recognizes the end piece, which is the double helix.
The double helix is the stuff that became famous from the Watson and Crick story, but the fact is that this is the stuff that's in all our nuclei. When I went to school I was told that's the stuff that parents pass on to children, and for the rest of the time you had the feeling that it was sitting there doing nothing. But it's active all the time. It's making stuff all the time.
Also, it makes stress proteins when it comes in contact with some dangerous situations. We've actually studied that reaction. We found the particular groups that it reacts with. It reacts with a combination of four particular residues—these are bases—CTCT. That's a particular combination that we found was responsible for the response to heat shock, to a temperature stimulus.
The interesting thing about it is that this particular combination, just on a chance basis, since there are only four of these bases involved in the DNA.... If you look at that slide of the picture, you see that the DNA is two metres long and it has three billion base pairs. In other words, this has many of these things sitting along there. When you're talking about a particular combination of four particular ones, CTCT, you can get that every 250 base pairs, on average. This means that there are many opportunities along that three-billion base-pair array that's sitting there on the DNA. There are many opportunities for interaction.
I have here this picture that shows you the double helix slowly being coiled into a coil, and then a coiled coil, and then a super-coil. In other words, there are many different sizes of coils in the nucleus that's sitting there in that chromosomal structural.
I don't know how many of you will remember this, but way back when television first came in, the antennas used to go up on the roof for reception of TV. TV used to be transmitted in two particular wavelengths. You had two different sizes of wires in there—or metal bars—that would pick up the different frequency ranges. In other words, the antenna functions by reacting to the wavelength of the radiation that's coming at it. That is what's happening with the DNA.
With the fact that you have all these different sizes of loops, you can get reaction like an antenna does. Why does it react like an antenna? It does because for the DNA—in the same picture I have there—where you have the double helix, these two twisted coils with the bonds between them are lined by electrons, which can move. They've been shown to move. There's a whole bunch of papers on this that come from Caltech. Barton has done many studies on that. She's a world-famous scientist and has shown that you can get movement of electrons.
As well, I think the reactions of the DNA with these environmental influences show that it does indeed happen with the different EMF frequencies. Because you have loops of different sizes, you can get reactions of the DNA with different frequencies of radiation.
That's why we ourselves have found interactions in the ELF range and in the RF range. Others have published interactions all along. In other words, these arbitrary boundaries are set by the engineers and physicists who set up that table. They're just arbitrary. When you set up an RF at one point and cut it off at a particular.... Notice that the cut-off is always at a point where the frequency has the number 3 in it, so it's either 300,000 waves per second or 3 million megahertz. The fact is that the set-up was arbitrary, totally arbitrary.
Naturally it's a continuum, so when you look at DNA, you see that it's the continuum also. It's almost as if you can react with almost any part of it that happens to present itself at the surface. I think this is reasoning from the observations. We have found, wherever we have looked at different frequencies and wherever it's been looked at by scientists, that you can get reactions all along.
I think the division between ELF and RF is entirely arbitrary, as you can see by the arguments that are given by the committee itself. The report we are reading actually talks about the fact that they have to understand what's going on in the ELF range in order to explain what occurs at the very low end of the RF part of their range. That's the way DNA responds. It has antenna properties.
In fact, one of the papers we published recently, which was also ignored, was about how DNA is a fractal antenna. That's a technical term and means that it has the capability of responding with frequencies at a very wide range. This is something that you can look up. Technology people are very wise to this kind of thing. It's a very useful thing to have a multi-purpose antenna. In other words, you can pick up a lot of different frequencies.
I would like to move on to the next slide, which is a reference to the research by Professor Alexander Lerchl.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ben Lobb
We're at 10 minutes now so I'll give you some time to summarize, but if you have a lot more, maybe the members can flesh it out through their questions.
Prof. Martin Blank
Okay. I'll just mention that I'm referring to Lerchl because he's been one of those who's been a naysayer. Anytime that anything has been presented, he has said that he doesn't believe there's any basis for a biological reaction. He has just published a paper saying the reverse. He says, “Our results show that electromagnetic fields obviously enhance the growth of tumours.”
Finally, that last slide I have is about recommendations. I think there are a lot of people being affected by this radiation all the time, and the least we can do is exercise greater precautions.
I particularly worry about the children, because children are sitting in schools six hours a day, five days a week, subject to Wi-Fi that's continuously on. That, I think, is something that doesn't have to be. It may cost a little more to put cables in to supply the same information in the educational programs, but you certainly don't need Wi-Fi to accomplish the educational results. I think it's a sin to have this kind of exposure for children when we don't know if it's safe—and many suspect it is not.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ben Lobb
Thank you very much.
Mr. Rankin, go ahead, sir.
I'll just advise our committee members that I'll have to keep it tight to seven minutes so that everybody gets a turn.
NDP
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
In fact, I'll take six minutes, please. I would like to ask if you could interrupt me toward the end so my colleague, Ms. Moore, could ask a very short question.
I want to say thank you to the two witnesses.
I must say that your testimony is very, very disturbing. I'm putting myself in the position of a parent sitting at home hearing what you've said, just after we've heard from Health Canada and Industry Canada assuring us that nothing is wrong.
Recently Health Canada sent a fact sheet to our committee. It was modified less than two weeks ago, on March 13. It would seem to suggest that there's really nothing wrong with Safety Code 6 in protecting Canadians. So I must say it's very, very disturbing.
The first question I have is for Doctor Sears.
If I could summarize, in your words Health Canada must review the science from scratch. They have to make the data more publicly available and they have to collect detailed cancer data because what you used to be able to get is no longer available, except at the provincial level. That's a very disturbing conclusion. The fact that the information is not being made publicly available is equally disturbing.
Can you elaborate a little on that?
Adjunct Investigator, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, As an Individual
There are two issues here.
One issue is that a lot of data that should have been collected is simply not being collected. An independent brain tumour group is starting up a database, but it's not in place yet. In order to detect the oncoming tsunami of brain tumours, should that happen—and it looks as if we may see an increase in brain tumours—we would have to have detailed information about where exactly these tumours are located. There's also an issue with tumours in the salivary gland, and we're not collecting that data at all.
You need to have detailed data on the location and the histology, the actual details—