Research article exposing the WHO’s ‘radiation protection’ topped the charts in 2025
Diplomat tells us that the article with the long title – “Effects on cancer in laboratory studies performed on animals from radiofrequency electromagnetic fields, a systematic review” – was the article in the well-respected journal Environment International from the large publisher Elsevier that was downloaded the most times in 2025.
Namely 28,000 times, which is an extremely high number for research articles.
What kind of article is this then? Why is it important and why was it downloaded by so many? Here you get the explanation, and how this in particular blames the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (Folkehelseinstituttet).
We must take a small detour to understand the significance of the many downloads and of the article that has received such reception:
The article with the 28,000 downloads is part of an order for 12 research reviews to various research environments to investigate whether health damage can be demonstrated from radiation weaker than the limit values. The 12 cover different types of health damage and have had similar research protocols developed, i.e., instructions for how the research should be carried out.
It was WHO’s small Geneva office The International EMF Project (TIEMFP) that ordered the 12 research reviews to refresh the basis for WHO’s radiation protection policy in the coming years. The 12 articles are therefore extremely important:
If these articles find health damage from such radiation we surround ourselves with from today’s radiation sources, it means that WHO will recommend stricter guidelines and limit values going forward. And vice versa: No findings of health damage can be used as a basis for more generous limits and increased use.
The other 11 studies did not find that any health damage could be demonstrated. However, this twelfth one did.
How can this difference be explained? The explanation lies in history:
The small WHO office that ordered the 12 studies has two permanent employees – a leader with a background in antenna research and a secretary. Their task is to spread standardization of radiation protection in the world, which is easy to understand can be good for both public health and business. The office’s advice is listened to, and also followed by most national radiation protection agencies, who rarely have any noteworthy expertise in the field of non-ionizing radiation.
This also applies to DSA in Norway: The competence at the national radiation protection agencies is mostly only linked to nuclear power and medical and technical use (x-ray, etc.), i.e., “ionizing radiation” which has very high energy and can easily cause heating and burn injuries.
Such injuries require much effort to obtain from “non-ionizing” radiation, unless you repair radars, embrace mobile base stations, break into transformer kiosks, or get shocked from overhead lines. “Non-ionizing” radiation has lower frequencies than light and that kind of radiation we get from all kinds of radio transmitters, power lines and other electrical equipment, and in other everyday situations has far less energy in it.
(For those especially interested: But the energy from the transmitters comes polarized and organized as positive and negative charges, not chaotic as in daylight, and can therefore exert relatively powerful push-pull forces even though it is very weak.)
The two employees at the small WHO office TIEMFP cannot do the job alone, and that was not the intention from the start:
To help themselves spread international standards for non-ionizing radiation, the small WHO office draws on personnel and guidelines from the foundation ICNIRP – The International Committee for Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection – which was created in its time as a branch of ICRP – The International Committee for Radiation Protection. All countries’ radiation protection agencies, such as DSA in Norway, are connected to ICRP, and ICNIRP thus got good help from the start and easy access to all ICRP members. (TIEMFP was created with generous funds from the mobile industry as ICNIRP’s channel into WHO, but that’s another story.)
Also the Norwegian ICRP member DSA – Directorate for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety – follows ICNIRP, yes actually so closely that all ICNIRP’s recommendations and guidelines automatically become valid Norwegian regulations. (No other countries than Iceland and Norway have embraced ICNIRP’s advice to such an extent.)
ICNIRP’s recommendations and guidelines are built on ICRP’s traditional thinking that it is the energy intensity that counts if you want to investigate damage effects and set exposure limits. ICNIRP’s guidelines are therefore well-suited to protect against heat injuries in workplaces where employees are exposed to close contact with plastic welding machines, radars and mobile base stations, high-voltage lines etc. But they are unsuitable to protect against damage that is not caused by energy intensity, but e.g., that pulses in radio signals interfere with electrical processes at the cell level – completely without creating heat injuries. And many studies show they can do that.
If you use ICNIRP’s guidelines to look for damage, you cannot find them: The measuring tool is not suitable for that.
And here we finally come back to the article with the 28,000 downloads:
What is special about this particular article? Yes, it is the only one of the 12 articles that FHI – the Institute of Public Health – chose to exclude in its report that was delivered earlier this year. And it is the only one of the 12 that chose to follow a research method that is capable of finding damaging effects from modern, pulsed and polarized radiation – such as that used in modern wireless equipment.
All the other 11 studies followed instructions that are based on measuring energy intensity in the radiation, which in practice means measuring whether tissue gets so hot over time that it takes damage. And it doesn’t from such radiation.
The authors of this one article resisted pressure from ICNIRP members who assisted the small WHO office in creating the research protocol. Instead of following it, they researched as they believed one must if the research should be good and honorable and suitable for the task. About the pressure they were exposed to, you can read more in my blog post 06.02.2026, where an interview with lead author Melke Mevissen is reproduced.
By filtering out this one and choosing the other 11 studies for their report, FHI researchers ensured that no health effects could be demonstrated in their material. Because it simply follows from the method these others have used.
You can find a more detailed description of how this method fails in blog post 16.02.2026, which also refers to a separate website where I have analyzed and systematized the failure with the help of the AI tool Claude. There you also see that this method recurs in analyses from several authorities:
They use methods with measurements of energy intensity over time that they have inherited from old radiation physics and use it to measure effects where it is not the energy intensity over time that counts. Then they also don’t make any unpleasant findings that would require stricter limit values.
Are we facing pure fraud, or is it just a matter of experts who are not able to see outside the professional premises they were drilled into during their studies in radiation physics? It’s not easy to say, but perhaps a combination, because it’s also the case that researchers in teams have different tasks and tend to limit themselves to what they are assigned to do. Besides, it’s often the case that those who do the reports don’t have any professional background in either radiation physics or biophysics, but perhaps only in statistics or medicine. That’s not enough to see through how the research protocol controls what they can find.
Who will help the national radiation protection and public health out of this predicament?
The 12th study shows the way. That it has been downloaded 28,000 times shows that the message reaches out, while bureaucrats sit in their departments and “trust” FHI and DSA people around the world who have received mandates that make them overlook such research “because it does not meet” the requirements for methods that ICNIRP and ICRP and radiation physicists within ionizing radiation have been concerned with: exact measurements of energy intensity.
And if it’s energy intensity one is concerned with, then one finds no systematic damage pattern, and can conclude “health damage not demonstrated,” which suits both the industry and the bureaucrats well.
Einar Flydal, 13 May 2026
Source (including feature picture) – Original article in Norwegian: https://einarflydal.com/2026/05/13/forskningsartikkel-som-avslorer-whos-stralevern-gikk-til-topps-i-2025/