When Devra Davis, PhD, MPH released her 2010 book, Disconnect, she experienced a very different reception than after the publication of her previous two books. Her book When Smoke Ran Like Water, published in 2002, had been a National Book Award finalist. 2009’s The Secret History of the War on Cancer was critically acclaimed and widely covered on public radio and public television. However, after several stints on CNN following the publication of Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation and Your Health, media coverage waned.
Perhaps the media were wary of criticizing a technology that had become so ubiquitous and which funded a substantial portion of their advertising. Or maybe they were incredulous of the harms documented in the book. After all, though Davis had been warning of human-made health hazards for years, cellular radiation was mostly uncharted territory.
The massive pollution and physiological harms to steel workers and their families in Donora, Pennsylvania, detailed in When Smoke Ran Like Water, were self-evident some 54 years after the infamous and deadly Donora smog.
The Secret History of the War on Cancer, revealing the commercial interests of industries that manufactured a host of cancer-causing materials and products, told the story of why, not what, everyone knew about these products.
But cell phone radiation, discussed in part in the War on Cancer, had not yet been addressed in its totality. Davis was confident her research would raise the roof on the telecom industry’s latest pollutant.
At that moment when Davis held Disconnect’s first book release – broadcast on C-SPAN‘s Book TV as an endowed lecture at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C. – it didn’t seem to matter. The crowd was standing-room only. The truth was emergent.
But the challenge of reaching the larger public about the impacts of wireless radiation, which you can’t see, taste or smell, was yet to come. It would be the biggest challenge of Davis’ career, made even more difficult because the message would be filtered through the very devices she was warning about.
By 2010, non-ionizing radiation — the type of radiation that is below the visible spectrum and is most commonly referred to as radiofrequency radiation (RFR) – was causing major biological impacts on humans, as Davis describes in Disconnect, not to mention on wildlife, trees, and pollinators.
But the popularity of smartphones and their commensurate dopamine hit had taken the world by storm. The telecom industry had sown the seeds of doubt about the non-thermal impacts of RFR and the public was mostly complacent.
Davis, an epidemiologist, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute’s Center for Environmental Oncology, and public health expert who was a lead author on the climate change research team awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize alongside Al Gore, knew that the devastating medical record on wireless radiation would not be established for decades. She also knew that waiting for human harm to befall millions was not an option.
Now, 13 years after the book’s initial release, the scientific record is clear, yet the telecom industry is still manufacturing doubt about harms caused by cell phones. It is also doing whatever it can to delay the inevitable – implementation of safety systems to protect people, animals, and the environment from the onslaught of RFR emitted by 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G.
As the new edition of Disconnect gets ready for release in the next month, Davis, who is still educating the public through her nonprofit Environmental Health Trust, shared updates with us about the telecom industry’s actions on wireless radiation, her organization’s mission, and the truth about cell phone radiation and your health. Here’s what she told us.
Question: Why did you write Disconnect?
Devra Davis: I wrote Disconnect because I was shocked, when I started to look into it, about how much evidence there was of the harm that can come from current low levels of cell phone radiation. And I figured that if I didn't know this, very few people did.
Question: Why did you reissue Disconnect?
Devra Davis: Because there are new things to talk about, and because frankly, we hope it will get a broader audience this time around because more and more people are horrified when they see children who will have a tantrum when you take away their iPad and they're three and four years old.
Those who understand the issue are increasingly dismayed when they see families sitting down to dinner and everybody pulls out a device, or children who won't go to the potty without their iPad. This is happening with increasing frequency, and I think more and more people are starting to question: What are we doing to create a generation of e-zombies?