Research Recommendations

1.    The National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies has looked for areas of RF research that need addressing. We should  incorporate the research priorities that they identified and build on them.
2.    The NRC report did not recommend or consider long-term studies, whereas long-term studies are needed to answer questions important to human health.
3.    Studies addressing potential health effects from RF require expertise from many fields. Thus, multidisciplinary teams would be beneficial for designing and executing the needed studies.
4.    Methods are needed for more accurately quantitating and tracking exposure to RF.
5.    When the wireless communication industry introduces technologic changes that alter exposure to RF, then they should notify the RF research community before the changes are launched so that the changes can be incorporated into study design.
6.    Epidemiologic studies: There is widespread agreement of the need for prospective studies looking at health risks associated with RF exposure
a.    Need to institute improved data capture in tumor registries and other databases where possible
b.    Multinational studies would be valuable because of the different exposures and different tracking available in various countries
c.    It would be cost-effective to tie into existing studies that are monitoring health behaviors and exposures and looking at health outcomes, including tumors.
d.    The use of geomapping could be explored to address environmental issues, including location of cell towers
e.    Studies should be done addressing risk to children, pregnant women and people with chronic diseases
7.    Clinical studies looking for biologic effects from RF:
a.    Studies on people who are hypersensitive to RF:
·    Identifying and characterizing sensitive populations, looking for the biologic basis and consequences for their hypersensitivity
8.    Animal studies: NIEHS studies will address many of the important biologic issues in rodent models.
a.    Transgenic mice or mice with targeted disruption of specific genes can also be useful in exploring tumorigenicity and other issues. For example, mice have been generated that have conditional expression of genes that are known to predispose to brain tumors.
b.    Other model systems, including zebra fish, drosophila, and c. elegans have been useful for understanding key events in development and might be useful for exploring risk of RF. An advantage of these relates to cost and time as well as the availability of organisms that can be used for studying changes in specific developmental pathways and/or biologic processes.
9.    Additional biologic studies: electrophysiology, neurophysiology, behavioral: based on peer review
Principles for reviewing and managing proposals:
·    We need to support high quality research, ideally involving multidisciplinary teams that have undergone peer review focusing on the importance of the research question and the experimental approach being used to get answers.
·    Thought-leaders from all relevant areas should be part of the review team, and a several tiered review process might be valuable for this type of complex research to maximize experimental designs or direction. This could include proposal revision between the first and second layer of review.
·    Stability of funding for long-term studies: for prospective studies, need at least a 20 year commitment, with an estimate of $100 million total to support proposals of this type
·    Need to have research data available for review as soon as possible. One can create incentives to increase cooperation and to accelerate access to data.
·    Need to make sure that we don’t lose sight of factors in addition to RF that might be negatively affecting human health, either in conjunction or independent of RF.
Funding:
NIH and NSF do not have adequate funds to support all outstanding proposals that are being reviewed. Thus, funds to address the RF issues need to be new money, not from these existing sources.
Funding decisions should be independent of industry influence.  A tax on cell phone sales is something that could be considered, as long as advocacy and other groups won’t discount research findings that result from this funding source.