George Carlo (USA) Teil I (Allgemein)

Gast, Donnerstag, 07.12.2006, 18:57 (vor 6580 Tagen) @ Gast

I have some very unique personal insight that I would like to share on this new Danish study. I will have a formal analysis and Safe Wireless Alert out on this by the end of the week. But, here is important background.

Indeed, John Boice and his colleagues have been on the cell phone industry payroll, and for big money, since the late 1990's. The money laundering vehicle is the International Epidemiology Institute -- the name sounds like a non-profit by design, but make no mistake, this is a big for-profit enterprise. When I ran the WTR, the International Epidemiology Institute, with Boice and a fellow named Joe McLaughlin, applied for funding to do this exact epidemiology study that was released this week. After much discussion within the WTR, they were refused funding because I felt they were blatantly biased and had overtly given us the notion that they would always create findings that were favorable to the industry. They thought that is what we wanted in the WTR -- they thought they were playing to the audience.& nbsp; But, they were wrong. When we refused to give them funding to do work, they we! nt directly to the industry with the same pitch, and were hired. They were able to make good on their pitch of being able to put "put all of this under the radar" by further laundering the industry support money through the Danish Cancer Registry. This is the pitch that was given to me personally and directly. I still have their proposal.

The study released this week is the second such study with the same "spin on the findings" from this group of investigators. In 2001, they also had "one of the largest studies to date", and Boice went on a bit of a television tour -- paid directly by the industry -- to blunt the effects of my Cell Phones: Invisible Hazards in the Wireless Age book tour. I faced off with him a couple of times on T.V. most notabley on John Gibson's n ews show on MSNBC. It is interesting that MSNBC is also asleep at the switch on this one.

Interestingly, the other person quoted in the news reports on this study -- and I am certain his name was given in the press package released by the industry for the study as that is common practice to make sure there is "independent corroboration" -- is Joshua Muscat. Muscat worked for me under the WTR. Muscat blatantly changed his data after his studies were completed under pressure from the industry. Specifically, Muscat's work -- peer reviewed and completed according to a specific protocol under the WTR -- identified a near tripling in the risk neuroepithelial tumors and a correlation between the side of the head where the phones were used and the side of the head where the tumor was located that were both statistically significant. I speak of these findings in my "Cell Phones" book beca use they were the findings in the final peer-reviewed report of the data. The findings of a statistically signif! icant increase in neuroepithelial tumors and significant tumor laterality concordance were the official findings of the WTR. However, the industry hired an epidemiologist named Linda Erdreich to participate in the peer review. Under her influence, Muscat's data "mysteriously" changed -- not once, but twice. First, in the report Muscat gave at the Second State of the Science Colloquium -- and published in the book that contains all of the papers presented at the Long Beach Colloquium in June 1999 -- the statistically significant correlation between side of the head where tumors were and side of the head where phones were used disappeared. Then, yet again, in the paper that he submitted to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the data were further altered so that the statistically significant increase in tumor risk disappeared as well. Both of these alterations in the data were flagrant breaches of the peer-reviewe! d scientific protocols that were intended to guide that research. In a letter to the editor of JAMA before the study was published, I pointed these inconcistencies out and indicated that I was the funder of the study. The journal ignored the letter and went forward with the publication. Clearly, the industry carefully orchestrated the Muscat fraud so that the data that were "published" in JAMA carried no statistical significance. The press release for that study carried the "no statistical findings" heading. Of course, all of these data manipulations are evident in published papers, but no one has chosen to raise the issue in the media.

Interestingly, when the Muscat JAMA study was released in January 2001, there was another "high credibility" companion paper released in the industry pack age along with it to support the "no cancer from cell phones" spin. That study, done by Inskip et al., was realeased two weeks early at the request of the industry, so that there would appear to be two leading journals debunking the cell phone-cancer hypothesis at the same time. They were all bundled into one package that was sprung on me one night when I was being interviewed by Dan Rather of CBS News. In that paper, Inskip himself pointed out that the study did not include any tumors that were within the range of exposure to the cell phone near field plume. However, even with the admitted shortcoming that the data were only marginally relevant to actual cell phone induced radiation exposures, it was lauded as another cell phone safety harbinger in the press package. And, who wa! s that Journal who agreed to release the study early under pressure from the cell phone industry? You guessed it, the Journal of the National Cancer In stitute. And, who had just left the payroll of the National Cancer Institute who runs the journal at the time? You guessed it -- John Boice.

Fortsetzung ...

Tags:
Hintergrund, Carlo, WTR