NTP Study on EMF – Loud and Clear, Why it Matters

By: David Schumann
A basic premise of toxicity studies performed by the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) is to compare groups of mice or rats receiving known doses of toxins with an unexposed one. The lucky group is called the control, and represents the baseline participants to compare any effects with that may arise in the exposed groups. From the statistical differences in results, conclusions can be drawn regarding how the toxin would affect human health and if it should be listed as carcinogenic. Other organizations perform the same purpose, like the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that has determined that radiofrequency electromagnetic fields are “possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B).” The concept is pretty simple, but the NTP study on cell-phone radiation is instructive, with surprises to pay attention to as they highlight key data showing again that EMF is harmful and carcinogenic, but also some reasons why the debate is still so obfuscated when the science is so clear.

First off, the study took more than a decade to complete and there was dissension in the researchers responsible to publish results and conclusions, which took more time at the end. The study was kicked off in the early 2000’s when first concern about cellphones began to rise in public attention. Then the technology was 2G and so this study looks at 900MHz cellular signals mostly, with some small evaluations of early 3G, but the core studies were 2G. Neither, of course, is anywhere near the 3G/4G/Wi-Fi signals of the last decade between mostly 2 and 5GHz, and 5G will go higher and more across an even wider bandwidth. Remember that this study is very dated and yet the results are the most recent US Governments, and comprise two parts. The first study that is still misrepresented, and the follow-up, that nailed the door shut but received very little attention.

The main results were finally released in 2018 and it was clear that EMF was carcinogenic to the rats with the exposed groups presenting all of the brain and heart cancers of most interest. The study reported these significant findings, but really only saw cause for concern in male rats. But for me, a curious phenomenon emerged in the control group. Those rats unexposed to wireless radiation did not have any incidence at all of the heart and brain cancers, or indicating hyperplasia. Yet the authors used additional control groups to do the statistics with from twelve past NTP studies. While not a bad idea to raise incidence confidence in the control group, my eyebrows were raised, so I set out to follow this trail and this is what I learned.

NTP Study – What We Learned

It was clear the groups of rats exposed to electromagnetic fields of varying doses had higher incidence of the brain and heart (Schwann cells) cancers. Amazingly the control rats, 180 of them, had zero incidence of malignant glioma, glial cell hyperplasia, schwannoma, or schwann cell hyperplasia. For the 1080 rats exposed to EMF in varying doses, their total incidence of one of these brain or heart cancers was 5.6%.

Furthermore, the cancer rate for males in all exposed groups was 8.1%. Females presented much lower with only 3.0% incidence of these brain or heart cancers. The observation that male rats were more affected by EMF is compatible with epidemiological data of other modern disorders, such as autism, which is more prevalent in boys.

The exposed rats were divided into two equal groups receiving their doses from either a 2G 900MHz GSM or CDMA cellular signal. They were further divided into three groups of 360 each with dose levels at 1.5, 3, or 6 W/kg specific absorption rate (SAR). More on this calculation ahead.

Important for this discussion is that all the rats lived in specially designed chambers so that their EMF exposure levels could be known exactly. They did this by constructing Faraday cages around the chambers that block all external EMF so that exposed groups only received EMF radiation from the designed transmitter with known signal strength. In this sense, these rats were exposed to just one cell phone their whole life, not the field of high-density signals of our 4G/5G world overlapping everywhere. The phones of this study would be the flip phone or the early punch the numbers to text styles, nothing that a teenager growing up today has ever used. The key, however, is that the control group rats received exactly zero external artificial radiation because of their chambers. This means they were truly unique, sealed into a time capsule of sorts where EMF from our world could not touch them.

What is the Control Group?

So when these controlled rats were analyzed by dissection, they had no brain or heart cancers. This makes statistics impossible, so they used another 12 groups to achieve something workable. I wondered how they would apply this data to the study and what I found was bewildering. The authors used historical incidence from the same strain of rats from more recent NTP studies on other chemicals. This pushed the control incidence of brain and heart tumors up with these controls averaging near 2%. That struck me as odd. Do 1 out of every 50 rats normally develop rare brain and heart cancers I wondered? But it was clear that when you compared the EMF results against the new control, statistical significance of the results drops. The researchers explained this as helping establish a better idea of heart and brain cancer incidence, but I heavily doubted that other NTP studies had specially designed chambers to shield ambient EMF.

This is a consistent problem with how studies evaluate EMF. The current protection standards are focused on just one single device, and never considers the hundreds of overlapping fields from other devices, towers, and routers. Since they are only ever looking for thermal effects, even with all the evidence to the contrary, they assume that these other control rats were free of EMF. But they were all actually bathed in artificial EMF their entire lives, from the phones in the pockets of the researchers and staff, to the six massive cell towers within two miles, and beyond. These groups weren’t controlled for EMF so they cannot be used in an EMF study. Doing so would only water the significance of the results down. Go put 180 more rats in the control chambers and let them live out their lives, but if you keep returning incidence rates lower than the twelve other control groups, that is saying something.

I wondered about the historical incidence of these control groups and if 1-2% rates were normal. I hunted for older control group data to see if the earlier results before the mass proliferation of phones and high-density networks of towers were different. Fortunately, the NTP publishes the statistics on their older control groups and I learned quickly things had changed. While rat strains have changed over the years (mostly because the older strains started to get too many inheritable cancers), and genetic predisposition cannot be ruled out for the HSD strain, the data shows that prior to 2000 the percentage of brain or heart cancers in a control group was around 0.2% max. In the early 2000’s that number moves up a bit, but suddenly the twelve control groups used to compare the EMF results to had average incidences around 1.5% with subgroups as high as 3 and 4%. Maybe this strain of rat is more susceptible, but it seems that something changed overtime and more proof that EMF is harmful and the full environmental contribution must be taken into account.

What is so amazing is that laying out in the open of these results is that for the first time in decades, control group rats were exposed to no artificial EMF sitting in their protected chambers, and they had zero incidence of brain and heart cancers. If you look at the records, the rates of these rare cancers appear to be rising until it was time to write the report. Then taking recent results means that when you review the results a 3% rate of heart and brain cancers in female rats is considered statistically insignificant. If they had just taken the control data from the date they commissioned the study, around 2000, the reports conclusion would have been alarmingly different and impossible to ignore. I’ve been to one of these labs that many of these past NTP studies were performed at, and it was right next to a college campus, bathed in cell towers and Wi-Fi.

This would be like studying the effects of air pollution, designing special chambers with the purest air for the control rats and when they have no cancer, grabbing some controls from labs that sit next to an airport and a Los Angeles bad-air day. It can’t be defended and so even though the statistics still show that cancer is a result, especially for males, the results are understated. That’s the point. This study was dismissed by mainstream science and medical reporting and nobody understood the gravity of the results.

The Follow-on Study That Received No Attention

If you search, you’ll still find bad articles dismissing the results of a clear and present danger for anyone using EMF devices and living near them. Still, there were enough people who saw concern to warrant another study and one was commissioned. In October of 2019, the follow-on study specifically looking at whether cell phone radiation could damage DNA concluded very clearly that there were “significant increases in DNA damage in the frontal cortex of male mice (both modulations), leukocytes of female mice (CDMA only), and hippocampus of male rats (CDMA only). Increases in DNA damage judged to be equivocal were observed in several other tissues of rats and mice.”

“In conclusion, these results suggest that exposure to RFR is associated with an increase in DNA damage.”

More radio-frequency radiation means more DNA damage. Yet still the NTP report is presented inaccurately today. Why are we not paying attention and demanding that the government advice and regulations on EMF be adjusted? This NTP result is not the most recent or the most damning evidence to prove the same thing, yet the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) can still say that “the available scientific data on exposure to radio frequency energy show no categorical proof of any adverse biological effects other than tissue heating.” Worse, the National Cancer Institute still proclaims that besides tissue warming “there are no other clearly established effects on the human body from RF radiation.” It’s a farce. The evidence is overwhelming. This is about our hearts and brains, our lives.

EMF is not a typical toxin, but these studies assume it is. This means it is highly likely that the results are much more understated than they should be. Unlike chemical toxins in our food or beauty products, which have specific uptake routes and chemistries for how and where they are absorbed, and damage us, EMF can go anywhere. It effects all cells and anything in the cell, including all the other toxins being studied separately. It has no bounds as it seems our irrationality does today.

After the report release, a senior scientist at NTP had this to say, and of course became the way the media spun the results telling the world not to worry about rats getting cancer:

“The exposures used in the studies cannot be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience when using a cell phone,” said John Bucher, Ph.D., NTP senior scientist. “In our studies, rats and mice received radio frequency radiation across their whole bodies. By contrast, people are mostly exposed in specific local tissues close to where they hold the phone. In addition, the exposure levels and durations in our studies were greater than what people experience.”

Is this so? Do I only receive radiation where I use my device or am I bathed in it from head to toe and into the depth of every cell 24/7? The question to this senior scientist should be why take fifteen years to do a study that has no relevance for humans? If rats get cancer but that means nothing to us, why waste taxpayer money killing the rats? Worse, the follow-on study shows clear DNA damage, so why aren’t their reversals and corrections to the record by the public institutions?

Furthermore, they say that the lowest SAR rating in the study was the maximum that a human could receive from their single device, so again, the results don’t mean anything to us. But the whole SAR game is a con and it’s used in all radiation and health protection calculations to ultimately let industry harm us. They use the same math trick in ionizing radiation to downplay the threat of manmade nuclear radiation. But SAR is a dose calculation for how much radiation is absorbed by tissue and it is severely flawed as I’ve written elsewhere. But the same energy is passing through the rat or the human, regardless of whether we have heavier brains and bodies. The mass of tissue is less important than the single cell or DNA molecule that does not care about the aggregate sum of energy, but is being attacked by free-radicals generated from the oscillating fields, and is attenuating energy into all working components in that cell, disrupting vital electro-chemical processes.

But we already have the answer, along with many other peer-reviewed studies that show that cellphone radiation is a human health hazard and carcinogenic. All the rest is word games, bad assumptions, and calculations that obscure the real results that lead to cancer and many more health effects that we strive to document here. The assumption they stick to is the ‘only thermal effects’ mantra that has caused a generation of health effects and promises much worse to come. Our greatest challenge is advancing the science of EMF and health beyond the current debate which is at least a decade old. This research needs to be conducted again for 4G and 5G technologies, but it’s too late. That was likely the plan the whole time, fairly common: agree to studies that take forever, water them down and eventually agree to another that will be too late also. This is why for my reader, taking this issue into your own hands is critical because the authorities won’t put your health and well-being first. Where have we heard this story before?