No Evidence for Increased Brain Tumour Incidence in the Swedish National Cancer Register Between Years 1980-2012.

BACKGROUND/AIM: The main objective of this study was to evaluate if there was an increased incidence of brain tumours between years 1980-2012, a time period when mobile phone usage has increased substantially. MATERIALS AND METHODS: From the Swedish Cancer Registry, cases of meningiomas, low-grade gliomas (LGG) and high-grade gliomas (HGG) were identified in patients between 1980-2012. Direct age-standardised incidence rates were used to calculate incidence trends over time. RESULTS: A total of 13,441 cases of meningiomas, 12,259 cases of high-grade gliomas and 4,555 cases of LGG were reported to the register during the study period. The results suggest that there may be a negative development in the trend for LGG of -0,016 cases per 100,000 and year, corresponding to a mean reduction of approximately 1% per year. CONCLUSION: The present study was not able to demonstrate an increased incidence of glioma during the past 30 years in Sweden.

Extensive frequency selective measurements of radiofrequency fields in outdoor environments performed with a novel mobile monitoring system.

A novel, car based, measuring system for estimation of general public outdoor exposure to radiofrequency fields (RF) has been developed. The system enables fast, large area, isotropic spectral measurements with a bandwidth covering the frequency range of 30 MHz to 3 GHz. Measurements have shown that complete mapping of a town with 15000 inhabitants and a path length of 115 km is possible to perform within 1 day. The measured areas were chosen to represent typical rural, urban and city areas of Sweden. The data sets consist of more than 70000 measurements. All measurements were performed during the daytime. The median power density was 16 µW/m(2) in rural areas, 270 µW/m(2) in urban areas, and 2400 µW/m(2) in city areas. In urban and city areas, base stations for mobile phones were clearly the dominating sources of exposure.

Supporting non-experts in judging the credibility of risk assessments (CORA).

PURPOSE: One of the crucial communication issues that have to be tackled by risk assessors is how to provide a comprehensible and informative characterization of their findings. The CORA framework (CORA stands for credibility of risk assessment) is designed for helping non-experts in judging the credibility of risk assessments. The CORA framework can be used by (1) stakeholders and policy makers, to make an educated judgment about the credibility of an assessment, and (2) the authors of a risk assessment, to improve the evaluability of their reports. The CORA framework consists of 18 criteria, leading to six main recommendations. The framework's application is not limited to (EMF) risk assessment, for which it was originally developed, but can be used in any area of risk or hazard assessment.