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Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

Autism and WiFi, a detailed debunking

A detailed examination of a publication described as linking WiFi radiation to …

Last week, the news arrived that a press release was claiming that a study demonstrated a link between WiFi radiation and autism. A quick evaluation of the press release and principal players involved in the study suggested that it should be taken with extreme caution. Fortunately, an alert reader pointed me to a copy of the paper (PDF) that has been made available, so a more detailed examination was possible.

It's still not possible to completely evaluate the paper, because the PDF doesn't contain the reference information—they're available on request or through the journal's website (which isn't actually maintained). I've been reading scientific publications since the late 1980s, and this is the first time I've seen this. Regardless, there's enough information present to get a better understanding of the work. Reading the paper, however, was enough to give me bad flashbacks to my experience exploring homeopathy.

The current understanding of autism

Autism is a blanket term that covers a spectrum of symptoms; affected individuals may also have any of a number of additional disorders, including those of the immune and digestive systems. It's entirely possible that it actually encompasses several related disorders that are distinct at the biological level. What we do know is that there is a strong genetic component to the disease, with multiple genes predisposing individuals to developing autism. These genes are not determinants, however; environmental factors and a person's sex clearly play a role.

When you read articles on the genetic aspects of autism, it becomes clear that these researchers consider the environmental influences a black box; they don't appear to find the papers describing individual risk factors to provide a compelling case. It's entirely possible that there are as many environmental influences as there are genetic ones, and none will ever emerge as the primary factor.

One risk factor that hasn't held up well to scientific evaluation has been the proposal that vaccines influence the onset of autism. It was proposed that a mercury-based preservative in the vaccine was inducing the onset of autism, but several countries have since eliminated this preservative, and autism rates have continued on their previous course. Since then, it's become clear that the initial proponent of the vaccine-autism connection had significant financial incentives to advance those claims.

Ideas that refuses to die

Strangely, the initial vaccine-autism link proposal (which is now scientifically untenable) has spawned what I'll call secondary proposals. These take the initial suspected link and extend it in new directions, even though that link is now considered spurious. For example, some who question the safety of vaccinations now claim that the use of live viruses, rather than mercury, in the vaccines is what is triggering autism. The happens despite the fact that, with the initial connection rejected, there is no more reason to suspect vaccines than, say, the television.

That's where we finally get back to this paper. A different group, instead of remaining fixated on vaccines, has focused on a secondary proposal related to the mercury idea. Even though the mercury in vaccines doesn't seem to have a significant influence on autism rates, this faction has expanded their focus to suggest that heavy metal toxicity, including that from mercury, is the environmental trigger for autism. Despite the fact that this concept is once-removed from a failed scientific proposal, people are actually making money by promoting it as a treatment for autism, including one of the authors of this new study.

You'd never know any of that from reading the study, which states, "Heavy metal toxicity has emerged as a primary etiologic focus, with most emphasis on mercury exposure derivative of vaccines, dental amalgams and environmental load from ingestion of contaminated seafood." That claim isn't directly supported by a reference, not that any are readily available. Neither is the later claim that this focus has reached general acceptance within the medical community: "There is a general consensus emerging among clinicians that first level treatment regimens for Autistic patients should include heavy metal detoxification." The paper clearly makes factually inaccurate claims about the scientific and medical status of its central premise.

How does this relate to WiFi? Not very directly. Radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation (EMR) in general is mostly impeached by proxy, blamed for a variety of things including bee colony collapse. Its relationship with heavy metal toxicity, however, comes through claims about ion channels on the cell surface. Specifically, EMR is proposed to "harden" cell membranes and shut down active transport channels, trapping toxic chemicals inside the cell (there is an elaboration of this concept available).

Not only does this proposal appear to be completely unsupported in the scientific literature, it seems impossible to support. The cell surface is studded with a huge array of active and passive transport channels with varying degrees of selectivity. There's simply no one active transport channel for all heavy metals that will respond in a well-defined way to EMR. Even if that part made sense, EMR radiation heats the water surrounding cell membranes—if anything, that should make them more fluid, rather than hardening them.

Madness without methods

Despite having absolutely no intellectual foundation, it's possible that the report could describe some interesting phenomenology by accident. But the methods, if anything, are even worse. The protocol of the study involved giving patients treatments to eliminate their heavy metal load in an EMR-free environment. The description of the treatments is pseudoscientific gibberish: "Subjects were given intervention in a sequential protocol that included a series of non-chelation provocations and nutritional formularies focused on mitochondrial resuscitation depending on the clinical profile of the client." Those clinical profiles were determined "based on a priori laboratory analyses, acupuncture meridian tests, medical history, consultations with subject’s parents and clinician observations."

I have no idea what any of that means. The procedure for eliminating EMR exposure was equally nonsensical, and based on nonscientific concepts: "Applications of body worn sympathetic resonance technology, energy resonance technology and molecular resonance effect technology were introduced as appropriate." What was considered "appropriate" was never described. You can get a sense for the nature of these items by reading a description of one such product; they're apparently used in creating memory in water, too.

Apparently, this "protocol" induced an elimination of heavy metals from the patients. But the methods don't describe anything about the samples used to determine this, so we're left to guess how they were obtained, stored, processed, or analyzed. All that's mentioned is that they were sent to an external lab for analysis, but the lab isn't even identified. The sloppiness is pervasive—one patient's clinical description included the phrase, "as if he were having a brain freeze from a cold drink."

Trivia in, garbage out

Most of the discussion is an attempt to build up a case that a set of unconnected observations paint a coherent picture linking EMR, through heavy metals to autism. Scientific terms are scattered about without a real understanding of their meaning or significance and inferences are drawn with little or no justification. Having followed autism controversies before, I can actually recognize some of the papers being cited even without a reference list, and it's clear that they don't support the conclusions these authors are drawing.

The press release that brought this paper to my attention stated it had been peer reviewed. Apparently, choosing your peers carefully can be an effective way of ensuring publication.

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