News & CommentKey Documents
August 20, 2004... Lennart Hardell has found no association between the use of cellular or cordless phones and the incidence of
salivary gland tumors. “There was no effect with increasing tumor induction period or number of hours of use of the different
phones.” Hardell and coworkers report
in the August issue of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. He cautions, however, that only six cases had used a phone
for more than ten years and all of these subjects had used an analog phone: “Thus, this study cannot exclude an increased risk
among subjects with heavy use for a long time period.” In the past, Hardell has reported an increased risk of brain tumors among
users of cell and cordless phones.
August 20, 2004... The California Public Utility Commission has
decided
to take a fresh look at its EMF policies, which were first adopted in
1993. At its August 19 meeting, the CPUC announced that it expects the
review to be completed within 18 months. In a related decision,
the commission approved a new power line, the Jefferson-Martin line, to
meet electricity demands on the San Francisco Peninsula. The CPUC is
requiring PG&E, the electric utility, to bury the line at a depth
of 11 feet “in all residential neighborhoods and by schools, daycare
centers, senior centers, parks and similar public places.” In addition,
the CPUC is taking the “unprecedented precautionary measures” of having
the conductors configured to reduce EMF levels. The decision on the
Jefferson-Martin line was unanimous. CPUC President Michael Peevey, a
former utility executive, abandoned his own proposal and supported the
proposed decision of Administrative Law Judge Charlotte TerKeurst. (For
more background on these two decisions, see our recent commentary, immediately below)
August 18, 2004... California will soon decide what's next for
EMFs.
As power line skirmishes continue to
smolder across the country and around the world, California regulators may be
the first to take stock of all the new health data that have been generated
over the last decade.
In mid-August, the five members of the
California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) will choose between mitigating
the EMF risks laid out by the state department of health or following the
path of denial favored by electric utilities.
After eight years of work at a cost of more
than $7 million, the leaders of the California EMF Program, run by the Department
of Health Services (DHS), evaluated all the available studies and, in a
ground-breaking report issued in June 2002, concluded that
power line EMFs likely play a role in the development of childhood leukemia,
adult brain cancer, ALS and miscarriages.
Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E)
counters that the report adds little more than speculation to the shaky
science of EMFs. The utility is asking the CPUC to leave the dormant EMF
issue alone.
Charlotte TerKeurst, the CPUC
Administrative Law Judge who has been reviewing PG&E's request to build a controversial new power
line, the 27-mile 230 kV Jefferson-Martin line, isn't following the industry
game plan. She believes that the time is now ripe to take a fresh look at EMF
health risks—in effect, rejecting the need for absolute certainty of harm
before moving forward.
In a proposed decision on the Jefferson-Martin line,
issued on June 8, TerKeurst writes:
"While there is no definitive proof at this point, we must proceed with the knowledge that EMF exposure may increase the risk of certain health effects" (p.89).She goes on,
"[I]t is entirely appropriate and prudent for us to consider the EMF levels that would be created by the various possible routings and configurations of the project."TerKeurst has also prepared an order that would force the CPUC to "reconsider" its generic EMF policies for all power lines in the state.
"While there is no definitive proof at this point, we must proceed with the knowledge that there is public concern that EMF exposure may increase the risk of certain health effects" (p.78).His pro-industry outlook should surprise no one. Peevey was a senior executive at Southern California Edison (SCE) for 20 years, the last three (1990-93) as its president. SCE has a long record of aggressively trying to bury the EMF issue.
"Dr. Buffler is not aware of any epidemiologic studies that show exposure to 60 Hz magnetic fields of '3-4 milligauss of more' are causally associated with an increased risk of childhood leukemia or any malignancy in adults or children" (p.111).This totally misleading statement turns on the word "causally" —the hired gun's favorite get-out-of-jail-free card. We all know that epidemiology can never show causal links. Buffler, like others who are paid to support otherwise untenable positions, uses the impossible burden of proving causality to dismiss unwelcome associations.
July 30, 2004... The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) is negotiating a
sole source contract with the IIT Research Institute (IITRI) in Chicago to run the National Toxicology Program’s RF–animal studies.
The studies will cost in excess of $10 million. The NIEHS requested proposals
last February, but no one responded.
July 29, 2004... The Japanese EMF–leukemia study discussed below will be presented at the
Children with Leukemia to be held in London, September 6-10.
July 23, 2004... In a new report, Mobile Phone Masts,
the All Party Parliamentary Mobile Group in the U.K. is recommending that every cell phone tower should be required to go through the normal planning process and that any blanket
exemptions be revoked. The panel noted that this was one of the recommendations of the Stewart committee in its own report,
Mobile Phones and Health, issued in the spring of 2000. “[Our] report is highly critical of the current planning system and
concludes that the voluntary code of practice by the mobile telecommunications industry is inconsistent and leads to public skepticism over planning decisions,” said
Phil Willis MP, the chair of the committee. He added that the panel’s 19 recommendations represent a “huge challenge” for the government industry, and
local authorities.
July 23, 2004... The House Committee on Armed Services has released the
findings
of the commission charged with assessing the threat of an EMP attack to the U.S. An EMP, which stands for “electromagnetic pulse,” is generated when
a nuclear weapon is detonated in the upper atmosphere. An EMP can zap electronics over a wide area causing damage to critical infrastructure, such as the power grid,
telecommunication systems and financial services. The commission urges prompt attention to this problem, which, it states, could be “catastrophic to the nation.”
The Congress requested the study in the fall of 2000 and it was due to be completed in early 2002 (see MWN, N/D00).
July 23, 2004... The Invisible Disease: The Dangers of Environmental Illnesses Caused by
Electromagnetics Fields and Chemical Emissions, by veteran Swedish journalist Gunni Nordström has been published by O Books in the U.K. and will soon be available in the
U.S.
Nordström has written a number of other books on health risks associated with computer work and EMFs, but this is the first to be translated into English. She pays special attention to
electromagnetic and chemical hypersensitivity.
July 22, 2004... Today, there has been another uproar about the accuracy of the
reports of what goes on at RF scientific meetings. Dariusz Leszczynski
of Finland’s Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority in Helsinki is
furious about the content of a so-called “Consensus Statement” coming
out of a workshop
on heat shock proteins (HSPs) held in Helsinki, April 28-29.
The statement,
which has already been widely distributed, contains the following sentence in its opening paragraph:
“Based largely on the evidence presented at the workshop, there is no
substantiation of the hypothesis that RF exposures result in the
induction of stress proteins.”
This morning, Leszczynski wrote to Norbert Leitgeb, the chair of COST281, and
Gerd Friedrich, its secretary, that this is “absolutely false.” Friedrich is the
head of FGF, Germany’s
wireless industry research group.
Leszczynski should have a good idea about what had happened at the
workshop: He hosted the meeting and over the last few years he has
published a number of papers showing that RF can activate HSPs.
In his e-mail, Leszczynski expressed surprise and disappointment that the consensus statement had been posted
on the COST281 Web site. Soon afterwards,
the statement was pulled from the Web. It is now undergoing another round of editing.
Leszczynski pointed out that the offending sentence was not in an earlier version
of the consensus statement, which had been circulated in May. According to FGF, Marty Meltz of the University of Texas Health Science Center
in San Antonio, Texas, and Blair Henderson of Austria’s Innsbruck University had made the changes.
A report on the Helsinki HSP workshop also appeared in the Bioelectromagnetics Society (BEMS) newsletter and,
as we noted in our recent commentary, “Industry Rules RF,
” this write-up prompted charges of biased reporting. In its workshop recap, BEMS neglected to even mention Leszczynski’s work.
(We continue to wonder why the society continues to allow Motorola
to control its newsletter. Some of the criticism that has been directed
at BEMS may explain the recent addition of a statement on the BEMS home page
proclaiming that its mission is to encourage “excellence in scientific
research.” Unfortunately, stating this does not make it so.)
Swicord is slated to speak at a workshop
in Brussels this September. He will be on a panel on “Public Health
Priorities for Future Research.” The title of his talk is: “Will a
Review of Current and Ongoing Studies Provide Sufficient Information?”
Anyone want to bet that Swicord will call for more research to
answer ongoing questions about RF effects on DNA breaks, the
permeability of the blood-brain barrier and, of course, activation of
HSPs?
July 22, 2004...When three cases of male breast cancer
showed up in the same small office in Albuquerque in 2001, a lawsuit
was quickly filed. “The odds of three men in one specific office
getting breast cancer are a trillion to one,” said Sam Bregman, the
plaintiffs’ attorney. He argued that the cancers were caused, at least
in part, by EMFs from an electrical vault that was next to the basement
office where the men worked.
At the two-week trial in April 2003, Sam Milham testified for the men, while John Moulder
was an expert witness for the defense. The jury decided that there was
insufficient evidence to hold magnetic fields responsible and declined
to award damages.
Milham would not let the case rest. In a brief
report
published in the July issue of the American Journal of Industrial Medicine,
Milham writes that, based on some conservative assumptions, the risk of
breast cancer in that office was a hundred times the expected rate.
Milham calculated that the chances of finding these three cases in that
office were 100,000 to one.
Milham notes that after Gene Matanoski
first announced an EMF-male breast cancer link in 1991, there have been
14 additional studies that have reported a similar association.
“I am more convinced than ever that male breast cancer is a sentinel tumor for EMF exposure,” Milham told us recently.
If you, like us, are waiting for the Japanese EMF–childhood cancer epi study to appear in print, don’t hold your breath.
Two years ago, Asahi Shimbun, a leading national newspaper, leaked word that Michinori Kabuto
of the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Ibaraki had
confirmed an EMF-cancer link in his own country. He went public last
year at a Symposium on Risk of EMF and Its Governance, held
in Tokyo on September 15. Kabuto reported that he had found a close to
fivefold elevated risk of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) among
children exposed to magnetic fields of greater than 4 mG (>0.4 µT)
in their bedrooms. This finding, though based on a small number of
cases, was statistically significant. Among those invited to the
symposium were Leeka Kheifets, Chris Portier, John Swanson and A.A.
Afifi. Now we hear that Kabuto is having trouble getting the study
published. It has been rejected more than once, we’ve been told by
multiple sources. “It’s crazy,” said one epidemiologist who has read
the paper. “It’s a very carefully done study. I don’t understand what’s
going on.” “It should be published,” agreed another leading
epidemiologist who has also seen the paper.
An exchange of letters in the July 1 New England Journal of Medicine
points to the continued institutional resistance to taking EMFs seriously. Last April 8, Ching-Hon Pui
and colleagues at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, published a detailed
review
of the mechanisms that could explain ALL. The paper includes this
sentence: “Exposure to residential magnetic fields has largely been
excluded as an instigating factor.” Only one reference was given to
support this conclusion —the
U.K. study headed by Nick Day, published in 2000.
Bruce Hocking, an occupational health physician in Melbourne, Australia, wrote back, citing the two meta-analyses (by Ahlbom and Greenland)
which have convinced most observers that EMFs play a role in the
etiology of childhood leukemia. Hocking also pointed to IARC’s decision
to classify 50/60 Hz EMFs as a “2B” cancer agent, that is, IARC
believes EMFs are possible human carcinogens. “The possible role of
magnetic fields in childhood leukemia should not be dismissed,” wrote
Hocking, especially since exposures can easily be kept low. Pui replied
that there are still plenty of reasons to be skeptical and even if
there were a link, “the attributable risk would be negligible” because
public exposures are so low. Pui misses the point, Hocking told us:
It’s not that EMFs don’t matter, it’s that we should keep exposures
low.
Of course, Pui’s review was published in a journal that has long disdained EMF risks. A few years ago, Ed Campion, an editor there, had a hissy fit
—the journal would call it an editorial— and banged the drum for an end
of all EMF health research. Since then Campion has moved up the
masthead and is now the New England Journal’s senior deputy editor.
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