More on smart meters and science abuse

The Northside listserv has been atwitter the last few days with more discussion about the smart water meters issue. Unfortunately, fearmongering seems to be getting the upper hand. One of the lead advocates against smart meters, Maria Powell of MEJO, repeats her claim that "studies have shown" these meters and other RF sources cause cancer and other health problems, comparing them to lead and DDT. The increasingly shrill and alarmist nature of these comments aside, what about these studies?

The fact of the matter is, the science on this issue is uncertain and not nearly as relevant to smart meters as Ms. Powell would have Northsiders believe.

The studies that Ms. Powell talks about (but doesn't actually cite, we'll get to that later) when she talks about RF causing cancer are studies on long-term mobile phone use. One widely-cited example is this Swedish study; like most of the literature, it looked at a specific, rare, and benign cancer of the inner ear and found a small (but uncertain) increased risk*. A single study like this is often unreliable because it deals with a small number of people and a rare effect.

When dealing with an issue like the possible dangers of mobile phone use, epidemiologists (scientists who study public health) rely on 'meta-analysis,' combining the results of lots of small studies into a kind of super-study, smoothing out the uncertainties and errors of the individual small studies. The meta-analyses on mobile phones and cancer are far less conclusive than Ms. Powell says:

...[T]here is little theoretical basis for anticipating that RF energy would have significant biological effects at the power levels used by modern mobile phones and their base station antennas. The epidemiological evidence for a causal association between cancer and RF energy is weak and limited. Animal studies have provided no consistent evidence that exposure to RF energy at non-thermal intensities causes or promotes cancer.... Overall, a weight-of-evidence evaluation shows that the current evidence for a causal association between cancer and exposure to RF energy is weak and unconvincing.

And a more recent U.S. study was unable to repeat the results of the European study that led to the World Health Organization calling RF "possibly carcinogenic" (a label that Ms. Powell and others have grossly misinterpreted, as I discussed in my last post on this).

It's important to note that these studies focus on mobile phones. As another meta-analysis states, "never before in history has any device of comparative prevalent use been associated with such high exposure to high-frequency electromagnetic fields (EMFs)." Not only is a mobile phone by far the highest-power wireless device people own, but it's the only one designed to be used right next to your head. It's quite a stretch to generalize these mobile phone studies onto other wireless devices, especially when a basic and fundamental law of physics tells us that the RF energy passing through your head is thousands or millions of times less intense at arm's length or farther.

Instead, Ms. Powell has repeatedly posted the link to a study by environmental consultants on a particular smart meter in California, whose computer simulations suggested that the meter might exceed FCC safety limits in particular situations. I find her argument unconvincing for two reasons:

• She accepts this study as valid, but rejects the response study that the State of California ordered the manufacturer to conduct with actual measurements (rather than computer simulations) as biased. Why is one study automatically biased and the other automatically correct?
• The environmental consultants' study doesn't say a thing about RF and cancer, instead arguing that the smart meters exceed FCC safety limits--the same FCC limits that anti-RF activists dismiss as too high and too reliant on thermal (heating) effects.

It's easy to scare people by equating RF with lead or DDT, but this is a fundamentally dishonest comparison. The cause-and-effect relationship between chemicals and human health has been studied and understood for decades. The thermal effects of certain types of RF radiation (what makes your microwave oven work) have also been understood for decades, and safety regulations are designed with these in mind.

Claiming smart meters cause cancer is doubly irresponsible: it relies on "weak" and "unconvincing" data on mobile phone use that assumes some mysterious cause in violation of the laws of physics, and it assumes that high-power mobile phone exposure is the same as low-power smart meter exposure.

My response to Ms. Powell and others is this: Please stop exploiting people's lack of understanding of what science is and how it works to scare them. Smart meters are a good idea and good for Madison.

* A note on risk: These studies almost always report their results in an 'odds ratio.' For example, if your risk of getting heart disease if you eat a Big Mac every day is 40%, but only 10% if you skip Big Macs altogether, then the odds ratio of daily Big Macs on heart disease is 4 (40%/10%). Odds ratios can be misleading when dealing with something rare: buying a second Powerball ticket doubles your odds of winning the jackpot, but is that meaningful toward whether you'll actually win?