Michael Repacholi on EMF health risk assessment
From the blog. Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Dariusz Lesczcynski:
The first guest blog on BRHP site was just published. It presents opinions of Mike Repacholi. Go to BRHP to read and to comment!
Posted on BRHP March 16, 2013
Excerpt
This is the first guest blog on BRHP. The opinions expressed in it are of Mike Repacholi himself. Publication of these opinions in BRHP does not mean that BRHP agrees or endorses these opinions. However, publication of this, and subsequent guest blogs, is an attempt to start an open debate and free exchange of opinions on RF and health.
Guest Blog by Dr Mike Repacholi, Visiting Professor, University of Rome, Italy
In this Guest Blog I would like to address a few issues related to assessing health risk.
1. The relative importance of epidemiology studies
The latest review of RF fields, HPA (2012), has set the scene for the importance of in vitro studies by stating “”a cellular change does not imply an effect in the whole organism, and neither a change at the cellular level nor a change of the whole organism necessarily results in a health effect.” So we cannot extrapolate effects found in cells to whole organisms. The advantage of in vitro studies is that they allow effects in a simplified model to found, but then these effects must be investigated in vivo to determine whether they occur in the more complex whole organism. Further, the in vitro models allow mechanisms of interaction to be investigated that then should also be investigated in vivo. HPA gives a reason for this: “” the main disadvantage is that isolated cells do not experience the many interactions that would normally take place in a whole organism and hence their response to stimuli is not necessarily the same as it would be in an experimental animal or human.” This is why public health authorities rely on epidemiological studies to assess health risks. They also rely on the results of animal studies to support the epidemiology studies. In fact IARC uses as a guide, if cancer is found in two different animal species then that cancer most likely occurs in humans.
SNIP
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