A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

Nancy Wertheimer: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )

October 8, 2023

In the summer of 2012, Paul Brodeur sent me an email that began, “Don’t forget that when I croak, you’re supposed to give some credit to me as the original microwave pioneer.” I came across it in my files after learning that Brodeur had died on August 2nd at the age of 92. It was among his many letters, notes and clippings I had stashed away over the last 50 years.

The story begins on a rainy fall afternoon in 1977 at the New York office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a public-interest environmental law firm, where I was working at the time. Brodeur, then a star investigative reporter at The New Yorker, came by with copies of his new book, The Zapping of America, an exposé on the dangers of microwave radiation and how they were being covered up. The previous December, the magazine had run two long articles by Brodeur which caused a national sensation and drew attention to the otherwise obscure world of electromagnetic health.

March 20, 2022

“Exposure to Magnetic Fields and Childhood Leukemia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Case-Control and Cohort Studies,” Reviews on Environmental Health, March 15, 2022.

A systematic review of 38 studies, which comes 43 years after Nancy Wertheimer and Ed Leeper first made the link. For years, they were largely ignored and ridiculed.

“Our results suggest that ELF-MF higher than 0.4 μT can increase the risk of developing leukemia in children, probably acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Prolonged exposure to electric appliances that generate magnetic fields higher than 0.4 μT like electric blankets is associated with a greater risk of childhood leukemia.” From Christian Brabant’s group at the University of Liège, Belgium.

January 9, 2017

Facts don’t seem to mean much anymore. We live in a “post-truth” time. So much so that post-truth was recently named the international word of the year. As 2017 opened for business, a stark example of the new reality came to our attention courtesy of Paolo Boffetta, an Italian epidemiologist now at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

In an interview with Fox News, Boffetta said that the link between power lines and childhood leukemia had been debunked. In response to a question as to whether it was safe for a pregnant woman to live next to a “huge power line,” Boffetta advised that there was no reason for concern.

According to Boffetta, the 1979 classic study by Nancy Wertheimer and Ed Leeper pointing to higher rates of leukemia among children living near high-current power lines had been contradicted by “newer and better” studies, carried out with improved methodology. Boffetta sent a clear message that “very high exposures” to power line EMFs are safe for pregnant women and children.

Boffetta has lost his truth compass.

February 25, 2014

Five years ago we reported on what we thought was an important clue in the search for understanding the well-documented association between childhood leukemia and EMF exposure. A team based in Shanghai presented evidence that children carrying a genetic variation linked to DNA repair were four times more likely to develop leukemia than those without that genetic marker. We called the finding a “major breakthrough” and predicted, “It simply cannot be ignored.”

We were wrong. So wrong.

What happened next —or rather, what did not happen— sheds light on why EMF research treads water and never moves forward.

September 25, 2013

"Now it is enough!" claims Maria Feychting of Sweden's Karolinska Institute. Feychting wants to stop wasting money on any more epidemiological studies of breast cancer risks from power-frequency electromagnetic fields (ELF EMFs).

"We can be confident that exposure to ELF magnetic fields does not cause breast cancer," she writes in an invited commentary published last week in the influential American Journal of Epidemiology (AJE). Feychting's call to stop research was prompted by a new study of breast cancer among Chinese textile workers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, which found no association with ELF magnetic field exposures. Feychting's confidence is based in large part on the exposure assessment used in the textile study, which, she believes, was "better than in previous studies."

If Feychting's call to halt research is heeded, she will have shattered a key driver for EMF–cancer research that has held sway for the last 25 years: the melatonin hypothesis.

July 27, 2012

De-Kun Li is the last man standing. Not long ago, many of the leading environmental epidemiologists in the U.S. were working on EMFs of one kind or another. They've all moved on —all except De-Kun Li, and he continues to break new ground in one study after another.

Li, a senior researcher at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, CA, has now shown that EMF exposures in the womb are linked to an increased risk of childhood obesity.

"Maternal exposure to high [magnetic fields] during pregnancy may be a new and previously unknown factor contributing to the world-wide epidemic of childhood obesity/overweight," Li writes in a paper posted today by Scientific Reports, a peer-reviewed, open access journal owned by the group that publishes Nature.

August 2, 2011

De-Kun Li's new study, published yesterday, got quite a bit of news coverage with comments from all over. One of the most surprising, at least to us, was from David Savitz, who some 25 years ago...

August 1, 2011

A mother's exposure to weak power-frequency magnetic fields during pregnancy substantially increases the chances her child will develop asthma, according to a new study by De-Kun Li and coworkers at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, CA. An average magnetic field exposure of just 2 mG (0.2 µT) during pregnancy more than triples the child's risk of getting asthma by the age of 13, they report in a paper released today by the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, a publication of the American Medical Association (AMA).

May 28, 2008

Robert O. Becker, a towering figure in bioelectromagnetics, died on May 14 due to complications from pneumonia. He was 84 and had been ailing for some time. Becker, best known for his research on "currents of injury" and the role they play in regeneration, made significant contributions to many areas of electrobiology. He was later drawn into public controversies over health effects — Becker is credited as the first to use the term "electromagnetic pollution"— and in the end paid dearly for speaking out.

"Bob Becker's passing marks the end of an era in bioelectromagnetics, that time when very few scientists believed that non-thermal electromagnetic exposures were biologically significant," said Abe Liboff, a physicist and the co-editor of Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine. "All the work on applying electromagnetic fields to bone repair is attributable to Becker's reinterpretation of Carlo Matteucci's discovery of currents of injury," he said.

January 23, 2008

Nancy Wertheimer, who more than any other epidemiologist was responsible for identifying the association between magnetic fields and childhood leukemia, died at the age of 80 on Christmas day. The cause was complications following hip replacement surgery, according to Ed Leeper, her life partner and long-time collaborator.

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