ELF EMFs: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )

John Snow is known as the father of modern epidemiology, best remembered for helping end the 1854 cholera epidemic in London. At the time no one yet knew that cholera is caused by bacteria, but Snow had long suspected that it was transmitted by food or water. In the hard-hit neighborhood of Soho where hundreds had died, Snow mapped the location of the homes of the victims and could see that most lived near the Broad Street water pump (see image below). Snow was able to persuade local officials to remove the handle of the pump and soon the epidemic subsided.

This could be a breakthrough, a major breakthrough. It could explain how power lines promote childhood leukemia. It could identify which children are at greatest risk. And it could shed new light on the pivotal role played by EMF-induced DNA breaks.

Chinese researchers have found that children who carry a defective version of a gene that would otherwise help repair damaged DNA are much more likely to develop leukemia if they also live near power lines or transformers. Xiaoming Shen and coworkers at the Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in Shanghai have reported that children with this genetic variant —known as a polymorphism or snp (pronounced "snip") —and who lived within 100 meters of these sources of EMFs had over four times more leukemia than neighboring children with a fully functional version of the same gene.

Three senior members of the public health community —each with extensive experience with EMF health research— have called for precautionary policies to limit leukemia risks to children.At a public hearing convened by the Connecticut Siting Council (CSC) on January 9, David Carpenter, Raymond Neutra and Daniel Wartenberg testified in support of prudent avoidance, as advocated by the Connecticut Department of Public Health (DPH).

Read our special report on the Connecticut hearing, with extended excerpts from Carpenter, Neutra and Wartenberg's prepared testimony. (See also our previous coverage of Connecticut's efforts to establish a state EMF policy.)

Magnetic fields have been linked to childhood cancer in many countries and now it's also been shown in Japan. Michinori Kabuto, of the National Institute of Environmental Studies in Ibaraki, along with a number of collaborators have found that children exposed to 4 mG (0.4 µT) or more in their bedrooms had close to five times more leukemia than those living in low-exposure homes. This statistically significant finding appears in the August 1st issue of the International Journal of Cancer.

A paradigm shift is taking place in the U.K. A high-level government advisory panel, the Stakeholder Advisory Group on ELF EMFs or SAGE, is set to recommend that homes should no longer be built near overhead power lines, according to the April 26 Daily Telegraph.

In an  April 29 follow-up item, Nic Fleming revealed that the National Grid is considering buying some 75,000 homes in England and Wales that are within 230 feet of high-voltage lines or 115 feet from lower-voltage lines. In contrast, on this side of the Atlantic, there is still no official recognition that power line EMFs present a cancer risk. For instance, an Arizona Public Service (APS) environmental scientist recently told the Arizona Republic that there are "no known adverse health risks." Who does APS' Marty Eroh cite for support for this view? The World Health Organization.

Precautionary policies to protect children from power line electromagnetic fields (EMFs) should have been adopted years ago. It’s a no-brainer, yet health officials continue to sit on their hands.

There has long been widespread agreement that EMFs are linked to childhood leukemia. They are also likely to play a role in both brain and breast cancer as well as in miscarriages and in neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

But health agencies have been unwilling to move against these largely preventable risks. It’s astonishing that those charged with promoting public health —not just electric utility executives— are the roadblocks to change.

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.

Wolfgang Löscher has suffered numerous personal attacks for his work on EMFs and breast cancer. But he struggled on, and now he may have resolved a fundamental problem in EMF research: Why different labs doing what appear to be identical experiments, produce conflicting results.

Environmental Health Perspectives will publish a new paper by Henry Lai and N.P. Singh showing that a 24-hour exposure to 100 mG ELF EMFs can lead to significant increases in single- and double-strand DNA breaks. The two University of Washington, Seattle, researchers found even larger increases following a 48-hour exposure, leading them to conclude that the effect is cumulative.