Arbitrary data segregation can be at best scientific folly and at worst unethical.
FLICKR, LUKE JONESThe International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) is currently in process of reviewing scientific evidence concerning whether the radiation emitted by wireless communication devices is harmful. However, some of the evidence published in peer-review journals may have to be discarded due to the flaws. In a recent opinion for The Scientist, I presented flaws of the Danish Cohort, the largest recent epidemiological study to investigate the possible health effects of cell-phone use. The other deeply flawed publications on this topic came out of the Interphone project.
Like the Danish Cohort, the strength of Interphone, an EU-funded epidemiological study to examine the possibility of a causal link between exposures to cell phone radiation and brain cancer, was its large size. In total, 13 countries in the study and researchers examined more than 1,500 cancer cases. But in 2011 Interphone published two studies, neither of which took full advantage of the massive dataset. Instead, each purposefully focused on only part of project’s data.
The first study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in May 2011, found no causal link between location of brain areas most exposed to the radio frequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) emitted by cell phone and location of gliomas in people of Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, and England. ...
