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A Paper Claiming Wi-Fi Is Linked To Autism Has Been Accused Of Pseudoscience

Butterfly88

Jello Queen
V.I.P Member
A Paper Claiming Wi-Fi Is Linked To Autism Has Been Accused Of Pseudoscience

An article in the journal Child Development that was reported on by national media could "cause serious harm", according to a recent paper.

Posted on October 24, 2017, at 2:50 a.m.


Tom Chivers

BuzzFeed Staff
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Grassetto / Getty Images
A paper in a respected psychology journal claiming Wi-Fi causes "neurological and cognitive effects" similar to autism that was picked up by national media has been accused of pseudoscience, cherry-picking articles, and misrepresenting research.

The journal Child Development published what was described as a "review article" –an assessment of existing literature – by Cindy Sage and Ernesto Burgio. It was titled "Electromagnetic Fields, Pulsed Radiofrequency Radiation, and Epigenetics: How Wireless Technologies May Affect Childhood Development", and was published in a "special section" of the journal addressing technology and children.

The paper got picked up by the UK national media. An article in the Express, published in May, asked: "Could wireless technology be causing MAJOR health problems in your children?"

It said: "Wireless mobile phones, laptops and tablets could be causing major health problems in children and contributing to autism and hyperactivity, a new study warns," and said that these devices, "which even include baby monitors, emit radiation and electromagnetic fields that pierce thin skulls, harming memory, learning and other mental skills".

However, a forthcoming paper by Dorothy Bishop, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Oxford who specialises in developmental conditions such as autism, and David Robert Grimes, a medical physicist also at the University of Oxford, has issued severe doubts about the study. They said its claims are "devoid of merit" and "should [not be] given a veneer of legitimacy". A version of the Bishop-Grimes paper has been made available ahead of publication.

The Child Development paper claimed that phones, Wi-Fi, and other sources of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) "are widely documented to cause potentially harmful health impacts that can be detrimental to young people".

The article itself said: "Overall, the scientific evidence is suggesting that chronic exposure to wireless emissions can have detrimental effects on the fetus, infant, young child and adolescent in terms of neurological development, memory, learning, attention, concentration, behavior problems, and sleep quality."

Its footnotes referenced 59 studies, many of which appear to link EMF to these negative outcomes.


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Daily Express / Via express.co.uk
But Bishop and Grimes said "this piece has potential to cause serious harm". They said there is no scientifically believable way that Wi-Fi could cause these effects, because the energy in Wi-Fi radiation is so much lower than even visible light, and that the authors of the Child Development study "provide no potential mechanism" for the purported effects.

They also said the evidence the Child Development piece presented was often not peer-reviewed. In particular they claimed that one piece of evidence cited in the paper was a widely discredited 2012 study called the BioInitiative Report, which was carried out by Cindy Sage, one of the authors of the Child Development study.

Sage took issue with this, telling BuzzFeed News the BioInitiative Report was "not debunked", and that its "great strength" was that it had been carried out "independent of governments, existing bodies and industry professional societies that prop up grossly inadequate public safety standards".

She went on: "Precisely because of this, there are the usual detractors. ... The BioInitiative Report is an internationally acclaimed scientific and public health report on potential health risks of electromagnetic fields and radiofrequency / microwave radiation and has stood assault from industry and its supporters for more than a decade."

Bishop and Grimes also claimed the paper failed to include major relevant studies, and said neither of its authors have extensive academic credentials, which "should function as a warning sign for reviewers and editors to be especially vigilant" for signs of pseudoscience.

Sage responded: "Child Development has considered our qualifications, invited us to submit, conducted peer review on our manuscript, accepted it for publication, and published it in May 2017. Our credentials were judged to be solid, the opinions of Grimes and Bishop notwithstanding."

She called into question the relevant credentials of Bishop and Grimes themselves, saying: "Bioelectromagnetic research is not a strong suit for either Bishop or Grimes, according to Google Scholar. Bishop is an experimental psychologist who is well published in the area of childhood language impairment.

"Grimes is a physicist and postdoctoral research associate who has published in various areas of science, but has not published in the field of bioelectromagnetics. He writes science opinion pieces and [is a] radio/television contributor (citing his blog)."

However, other scientists BuzzFeed News spoke to agreed that in their opinion there were many problems with the Child Development review article. Dr Andrew Przybylski, an experimental psychologist at the Oxford Internet Institute, said the review failed to reference some very important studies, while including some that it shouldn't.

For instance, Przybylski said, it discusses a link between EMF and cancer. But the largest-ever study into the issue, a "really rigorous" piece of work following tens of thousands of Australians for 30 years, found no link, and isn't mentioned. "There was some pretty blatant stuff missing," he said.

Grimes, one of the authors of the new paper, told BuzzFeed News that the BioInitiative Report the Child Development study relied upon is "a piece of work which has been roundly criticised by the scientific community and effectively debunked" by several national and international health bodies. The BioInitiative Report was itself coedited by Cindy Sage; six more of her citations in the footnotes are of her own work.

Dr Pete Etchells, a psychologist at Bath Spa University, told BuzzFeed News that the review article refers to American Academy of Paediatrics guidelines on screen time that were issued in 2012 and have since been changed. "They’re not citing up-to-date stuff," he said. "They’re citing cherrypicked stuff to promote a certain viewpoint."

The review article's findings were not supported by the bulk of mainstream science, according to the scientists we spoke to. Andy Lewis, the author of the Quackometer anti-pseudoscience blog and himself a former radiation protection officer with a PhD in nuclear physics specialising in how radiation interacts with human tissue, told BuzzFeed News: "This is a well-understood area of science with an overwhelming consensus that the exposure we have to these technologies does not present a health risk."

All of the scientists we spoke to said it was surprising that this paper was published by Child Development, which has already reclassified Sage and Burgio's paper as a "commentary" and is expected to publish another by Grimes and Bishop in coming months.

"The report is highly selective and unbalanced in its evidence and does not present the prevailing countering view in any meaningful way," said Lewis. "This is basic nonsense, there’s no science," said Etchells. "It’s an essay, basically, and not a very good one."


CORRECTION
October 27, 2017, at 8:00 a.m.
PeerJ Preprints is a preprint service, not a journal, and the Sage-Burgio paper was a review, not a study.

Source: A Study Claiming Wi-Fi Is Linked To Autism Has Been Accused Of Pseudoscience


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Certainly sounds like pseudoscience to me, as autism has been around longer than wi-fi.
 
Not that I disagree with ALL of what is said here...

One HUGE problem... Many of us on this forum alone, were not exposed to some of this till later in our lives.
I'm a kid who was raised in ultra rural conditions without tons of this type stimulus being around... Sounds a tad agenda based, but who knows.

On the other hand... I can hear my router across the room. I can pickup on stuff that drives me bonkers that no one else even hears... So yes, I can see it as maybe aggravating some ASD situations, but root cause... not really possible, if history is taken into the equation.
 
The stupid thing is recently I've read reports that state that autism is a growing condition, E.g. a higher percentage of people are on the autistic spectrum now than they were say 30 years ago and it's apparently been gradually increasing. Unfortunately these kind of reports help fuel arguments such as this as people then look for a cause for this apparent increase and of course wifi and mobile communications has grown exponentially over the last 30 years.

I however believe the reports of autism increasing over the years are totally false and increasing wifi and mobile communications have had no significant impact on autism or any other associated conditions! In my opinion the percentage of people on the autistic spectrum hasn't changed significantly in recent years, the only thing that's changed is more people on the autistic spectrum are being diagnosed these days, where years ago a lot more aspies suffered in silence, often without understanding why they were having such a difficult time. In some ways technology has increased understanding and diagnosis by giving more people easy access to much more information as well as easy communication over the Internet, forums such a this one can make a real difference for instance. In many ways increases in diagnosis is a good thing as it shows a greater overall understanding of the condition. There's still a very long way to go however before people on the autistic spectrum are reasonably understood by the vast majority of people and are rarely prejudiced against, it also very difficult to change the negative attitudes towards autistic people by some NTs who simply don't want to be re-educated (the best hope there may even be to change attitudes of future generations).

PS: I was born in 1969 and my 2 brothers in the early 1970s, I have high functioning autism, while both my brothers have severely low functioning autism (as adults they can't read / write or count to 5 for instance). All 3 of us were diagnosed as being autistic in the 1970s, long before mobile phones or the Internet, but we was only diagnosed early because all 3 of us were extremely slow to develop, especially with speech and we all had blatantly obvious traits. A lot of children that would now be diagnosed as having Asperger Syndrome or a new name for it (autism without slow speech development) wouldn't have been diagnosed with anything they would have linked directly to autism back then, many would be considered just to have behavioural issues and a lot would have sadly been punished for it too.
 
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