What is your daily exposure to electromagnetic fields?
Should you be worried?
Tonight on Frontline, find out in Currents of Fear.
Funding for Frontline is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by annual financial
support from viewers like you.
This is Frontline.
Imagine an environmental agent to which everyone is exposed day and night.
An agent that is invisible, odorless, and silent.
An agent that affects young and old alike, at work and at play.
Now imagine that this agent has been linked in dozens of studies to various cancers, but
that the authorities have taken no action to protect their citizens.
Some people believe this is what is happening now in America.
The threat they see comes from the electromagnetic fields produced by the more than two million
miles of power lines that crisscross the country.
I think there is a major public health hazard here.
I think the evidence to date clearly shows it.
I think it is an unforgivably stupid public health policy to say that before we implement
any kind of preventive measures, we should continue to study this for another five or
ten years in the laboratory.
Omaha, Nebraska, like everywhere, depends on electricity.
The Larm family never questioned it until 1992.
In February of 1992, my oldest son, Kevin, was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia.
That very day, in tears, I wanted to know what caused this cancer because I was afraid
for all my children.
Julie Larm took Kevin to the Omaha Children's Hospital to be treated.
There she encountered other children with cancers, like Jonathan Hendricks and his mother
Dee.
Dee was startled by the number of kids at the clinic with cancer.
When going through the oncology clinic here in Omaha Children's Hospital, I was blown
away.
In fact, I was in tears by the amount of other children that were suffering from cancer.
I could not get out of my mind the faces of all the other bald-headed babies.
I knew instantly that this was not a normal thing going on.
I wondered what it was in my neighborhood or in Omaha that could have possibly caused
my son to have cancer.
And driving home one night, I noticed that there were huge transmission towers that were
scattered throughout the neighborhood.
Julie and Dee became friends and soon were contacted by other concerned citizens like
Adrienne.
I was diagnosed with herparamophilia.
I was diagnosed with Addison's disease.
I've had seven unexplained miscarriages.
I have been diagnosed with cancer.
I've had a complete hysterectomy.
My parents lived 50 foot from a 160-volt line tower.
We grew up as children playing, having tea parties, whatever, under that.
Their suspicions that power lines had something to do with all these health problems were
apparently confirmed when, a few months later, they saw a segment of the CBS News magazine
Street Stories about the dangers of electromagnetic fields, or EMFs.
The program featured a school in California where teachers had abnormally high cancer
rates and a landmark Swedish study showing that children living near power lines had
up to four times the risk of childhood leukemia.
Immediately after this landmark study was released, the Swedish government and the power
companies accepted the connection between electromagnetic fields and cancer.
Also interviewed was a senior public health official, Dr. David Carpenter.
I feel very strongly about this issue because I really feel people are dying from exposure
to magnetic fields that could easily be avoided.
So I called the health department the next day.
They told me I had to gather the names and diagnosis for as many children as we could
before they would start an investigation.
So we began a telephone line of calling parents that we knew, and then they would in turn
call parents, and we got a list of 11 children that lived within one mile of the substation
that had been diagnosed with cancer within the last seven years.
So then we called the health department back, and they in turn then did an investigation.
We are getting an official map with the lines.
While they waited for the health department, they began plotting cancers on a map and reading
everything they could find on the health effects of magnetic fields.
One author that caught their attention was pioneering environmental journalist Paul Brodeur.
He had written about similar EMF cancer clusters in Connecticut and California.
My name is Paul Brodeur.
I've been a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine for the past 35 years.
I was the journalist who first alerted the nation to the health hazard posed by asbestos.
For Brodeur, EMFs were simply the latest of a series of environmental toxins that industry
and government had tried to conceal from the public.
It's pervasive.
You literally have millions of unsuspecting men, women, and children exposed to power
frequency magnetic fields that have already been associated in dozens upon dozens of studies
conducted and published in the peer-reviewed medical literature levels that are associated
with the development of cancer.
Never before has there been this much epidemiological evidence of the carcinogenicity of any agent,
and that evidence subsequently declared to be invalid, and that agent subsequently declared
to be benign.
By the time Julie Dee and Adrienne met with the Nebraska Health Department, they had become
convinced there was a serious problem with the power lines in their neighborhood, and
they were in no mood to be patronized.
We used your map to put our dots on.
These are the four zip codes outlined in yellow, these are substations, okay.
Something's going on in this neighborhood, there's too many dots that represent families
that are being torn apart by cancers, there's too many 17-month-old bald-headed babies in
the neighborhood, and we're going to scream until someone figures out what's going on
in this neighborhood.
Yeah, the truth of the matter is that almost without exception, cancer cluster investigations
don't come up with anything, they don't find a risk factor or a series of risk factors
that might be responsible for the increase in the number of cases of cancer.
When the head of the health department failed to turn up to this meeting, Adrienne became
angry.
Those are people, my sister dying of brain cancer, I watched her rot in Mayo Clinic for
a year, and then a head of a health department doesn't come to the meeting, that's baloney.
We get lied to, we get ignored, we have to go get our own information, we have to make
our own maps, we have to find out about substations.
That is not what our elected officials are for.
We're getting screwed from both sides.
The Omaha mother's concerns are shared by this man, Dr. David Carpenter, Dean of the
School of Public Health at the State University of New York, Albany.
Carpenter has been convinced for almost a decade that EMFs pose a genuine risk.
In my judgment, they are dangerous.
Up to 15% of all cases of childhood cancer might be attributable to exposure to magnetic
fields from the power lines in the street.
But not everyone agrees that power line magnetic fields are dangerous.
The group most skeptical of Carpenter's claims are engineers and physicists, who argue that
the laws of electricity and magnetism discovered a century ago are among the best understood
theories in science.
So those sparks are being produced by about one and a half million volts of electricity,
but I can touch the inside, metal on the inside with my bare hands.
So much so that museum staff entrust their lives to those principles every day, demonstrating
them to children.
There is probably nothing on earth or in the universe that we understand as well as electromagnetic
fields and the interaction of electric magnetic fields with matter, including biological matter.
All of chemistry and almost all of biology, excepting a few gravitational effects, are
electrical.
Bob Adair and his colleague Bill Bennett are professors of physics at Yale University.
A few years ago they became interested in this area, and the more they studied it, the
more skeptical they became.
The notion that power line electromagnetic fields could cause disease seemed on the face
of it to be scientifically impossible.
The thing that struck me most puzzling about it is that the fields these people were dealing
with are absolutely minuscule.
They're talking about fields of two or three milligauss, fields that are one-two hundredth
or so of the earth's magnetic fields.
In the back deck, the milligauss readings, today they're kind of low.
Magnetic fields are measured in milligauss.
The fields recorded in most homes are of the order of a few milligauss at most.
Yet as every school child knows, we live in a magnetic field, the earth's magnetic field,
which causes a compass needle to point north.
And this field is hundreds of times larger.
In America, it is about five hundred milligauss.
The earth's field, physicists argued, would totally dwarf those from power lines.
There is absolutely no reasonable biological comparison between the earth's magnetic field
in which we evolved as human beings and which, as some people think, is responsible, at least
partially, for the way our brains and central nervous systems developed, and the power frequency
fields, which have only been with us, really, in a meaningful way for fifty-six, seventy
years.
The magnetic field given off by power lines alternates to and fro sixty times a second
to the rhythm of the sixty hertz alternating power.
When you're standing underneath a power line, every cell in your brain and body is entrained
to the rhythm.
Well, that rhythm is going sixty times a second.
But physicists have calculated the force this oscillating magnetic field could exert on
moving charges in the body, and the electric currents it could induce, and concluded they
are tiny, thousands of times less than the effects of the body's own heat bouncing molecules
around.
It's completely lost in the noise.
The oscillation from the magnetic fields is absolutely minute compared to the general
thermal oscillations.
It would be a little like, let us say that you have a windstorm, an erratic windstorm
where the wind's blowing all over the place, and somebody called your neighbor calls up
and said, your cat is breathing on my tree.
Since he breathes in and out, that causes the tree to be pushed in and out, and that
might damage the tree.
Well, you wouldn't take it very seriously.
Physicists found it even harder to see how such a tiny field might cause cancer.
Cancer is usually caused when very energetic radiation or some chemical agent directly
breaks or rearranges DNA.
Adair calculated that power line fields were millions of times too small to do this.
John Molder is a radiation biologist, a specialist in how radiation can cure or cause cancer.
Certain types of electromagnetic sources, the high energy ones, X-rays, cosmic rays,
are capable of actually breaking bonds in biological material and in cells.
And it's that breaking of bonds, specifically breaking of bonds in the genetic material,
that can cause cancer.
This kind of radiation, ionizing radiation, lies at the high end of the electromagnetic
spectrum, vibrating at very high frequencies, 10 billion trillion times a second.
Ionizing radiation like gamma rays from radioactive fallout, cosmic rays from space, and medical
X-rays can all cause cancer.
But at lower frequencies, the radiation no longer has the energy to break DNA.
Within the optical frequencies, the photons have enough energy to excite electrons and
molecules and that's the basis of how flowers grow and of how we see.
Once we get down a little bit lower, down to lower frequencies now, into infrared and
then into the microwaves and radio frequencies, the photon energy isn't even enough to do
that.
But it can heat and that's how a microwave oven works.
It works by heating molecules.
As the frequency gets a little lower, we now pass through the frequencies used for cellular
phones, then television and FM radio and then even lower the ones used in broadcast AM radio.
Around where AM radio is, the frequency is so low, the photon energy is so low, we don't
even get heating.
24 hours of every day, we are bathed in electromagnetic energy from all parts of the spectrum.
Right at the low end, one million times less energetic than AM radio are power line EMFs.
The fields from these lines vibrate only 60 times a second.
This frequency is so low and the energy in the field so tiny that all other natural sources
dwarf it.
Physicists have calculated a person standing under a power line at night would get some
10,000 times more electromagnetic energy from moonlight than from the power line.
Such arguments led the 45,000 member American Physical Society to release a report last
month saying that cancer fears were unfounded.
Who says that the lower frequencies don't operate in another way to cause cancer?
Who says that they all have to act in the same way?
Who says they do?
Ludicrous.
I mean, what kind of mindset is that?
Well, I fear it's the mindset of the American physicist.
The fact that the physicists don't want to believe that should not in any event be the
engine that drives public health policy in the face of all this epidemiology, which isn't
the only valid tool we've ever had to take preventive public health measures.
It was through epidemiology that we learned that cigarette smoking was hazardous.
Through epidemiology that we learned that asbestos inhalation was hazardous.
Through epidemiology that we've learned that virtually every one of the environmental carcinogens
that we know today and against which we've taken action has come to light through epidemiology.
So the physicists are going to tell us, no, forget epidemiology, let's go into the lab.
Give me a break.
When have they ever discovered anything about biology?
Do you think they should stay out of this debate?
No, I think everybody should get into the debate, the more the merrier.
But I think it's ludicrous for physicists to try to pretend that they know about biology
when they don't.
And the example I gave that the last time they got involved in a major public health
controversy it was to assure the American people that no possible hazard comes radioactive
fallout goes to show you how stupid and wrong they were about ionizing radiation.
Traditionally, epidemiologists studied epidemics.
Working back from an epidemic, usually an infectious disease, they tried to find a cause.
Great successes of epidemiology include the major infectious diseases and modern plagues
like AIDS.
But increasingly, epidemiology has been used to link environmental toxins with disease
and this has proved more controversial.
Here where the effects are strong, most scientists concede that epidemiology alone is sufficient
to prove a serious public health risk.
In heavy smokers, for example, the risk of disease, the so-called risk ratio is ten to
twenty times that of a nonsmoker.
Similarly, high risks were found in studies of asbestos workers.
These findings were so striking that even before there was supporting laboratory evidence,
many public health officials were convinced that such toxins endangered the public and
advocated preventive health measures.
So if magnetic fields pose similar risks, one might expect that electrical workers exposed
to very high fields would get cancer at a significantly higher rate than average.
EMF activists like Brodeur claim this is indeed the case.
The clear preponderance of the occupational studies show that workers exposed to power
frequency magnetic fields at home and at work are developing cancer at statistically significant
higher rates than non-exposed people.
But Brodeur's interpretation of the dozens of epidemiological studies isn't shared by
many scientists.
The first thing you ask is how strong are the correlations when you see them.
So my favorite analogy is to cigarette smoking.
Cigarette smokers have ten to twenty times the incidence of lung cancer of nonsmokers.
That's a strong association.
In the power frequency studies where we find associations, they've tended to be pretty
weak.
In the EMF studies that found an elevated risk of cancers, risk ratios of only 1.5 to
2 are typically seen.
The second thing you would look for is, is it consistent?
Does everybody find the same thing?
All studies, for instance, of smokers showed elevated lung cancer.
But with the power frequency occupational studies, you don't see that.
Some studies show leukemia elevated, some studies don't.
Some show brain elevated, some show that they're not.
Three recent very large occupational studies produced quite inconsistent results.
One found elevated levels of brain cancer, but no leukemia.
A second found no brain cancer, but did find a suggestion of a link with leukemia.
A third found nothing at all.
Many epidemiologists think this inconsistency combined with such low risk ratios raises
serious questions as to whether there is in fact a real risk or whether all the studies
are picking up is statistical noise.
If it's a low level risk, you have to be very careful.
Epidemiology is not sufficient in and of itself unless you have a situation where you have
an overwhelming disease response.
We have a few examples like that.
The vinyl chloride monomer story where a small number of workers developed a very rare malignancy
angiosarcoma of the liver and were identified as having very high exposures to vinyl chloride
monomer in the process of cleaning out some of the reactors.
There we had a risk ratio which exceeded 200.
There were also issues about whether all of the workers in these studies had really been
exposed to magnetic fields.
While serving on the Oak Ridge panel investigation into EMFs, Bill Bennett read dozens of epidemiological
papers and found some were quite misleading.
There was one report published that referred to an epidemic of male breast cancer among
telephone linemen in New York State in the phone company.
When you look at the data, you find that although this predicted a relative risk of something
like 6.5 to 1, there were only two cases that were reported and they weren't linemen at
all.
They were actually office workers.
So that somehow on the basis of these two cases one is led to believe that there was
a serious problem involved.
And Bennett realized there were other occupational categories that epidemiologists seemed to
have virtually ignored.
Going down to the Amtrak station, he measured a 50-milligauss magnetic field, even with
no trains, and he decided to do an experiment.
I took data coming from Washington into Haven at two-second intervals with a gauss meter
and what I noticed in that result was that the magnetic fields were enormously high compared
to most of the epidemiological studies.
On his journey, he measured peak magnetic fields as high as 600-milligauss.
There hasn't been a major epidemic of leukemia among electric railroad commuters to my knowledge
or among workers on electric railroads who would be exposed to the fields even longer.
Last year, one Norwegian study did investigate electric railway workers.
It found no effect.
But there are other problems that make interpreting the occupational epidemiology difficult.
While workers in a substation are exposed to about 40-milligauss, the fields from home
appliances can be quite large as well, especially six inches or less from the appliance.
You can't be turned down for any reason.
Okay, let me hand them the kit.
While these appliances are only on intermittently and the fields fall off quickly with distance,
some, like electric blankets, can give long-term exposure.
All of this makes the EMF issue far more complex than most epidemiology.
As we live in an electric world with appliances and with overhead and underground cables,
virtually everyone is exposed at home, in the workplace, even in the park.
Even the epidemiologists who believe there may be a link with disease fear it may be
impossible to prove.
Cumulative exposure in the workplace is not notably higher than the cumulative exposure
from outside the workplace.
So if you have someone who's working, let's say, as an electrician and look at how much
exposure they accrue over their workday, if they go home and use an electric blanket or
perhaps live near certain kinds of power lines, they may actually get an equivalent amount
of exposure at home.
Paul Breder passionately disputes that the epidemiological studies are flawed and in
a recent book argues that the truth is being concealed from the public.
The cover-up involves government and industry, notably the Electric Power Research Institute,
which funds much of the research.
Mulder thinks this far-fetched.
First of all, they would have to know the study was going to be negative before they
funded it.
And second, to repress positive findings in funded studies, I think would be next to impossible.
Because you'd have to repress it in this country, you'd have to repress it in other
countries, you'd have to repress publications by industry, by government, by academics.
I don't think you could do it.
Are you saying they're lying?
I didn't say they were lying.
I never said they were lying.
And I have never claimed, nor do I believe, that any one of these scientists or any scientists
who are being financed by EPRI or by the utility industries are falsifying their scientific
data.
What they are doing, and let's be clear about this, is not lying.
They are coming out and they're making public pronouncements about their opinions.
It is my quote, it is my opinion that there's absolutely no validity in any of the epidemiological
studies that have been done so far.
That's Patricia Buffler.
Madam Buffler is not only a paid consultant of EPRI, she's a paid consultant of the San
Diego Gas and Electric Company and has given an affidavit for them in court.
I've worked with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reviewing their document on EMF, and
I've worked with the Electric Power Institute putting in place their research program.
Those are very important activities to participate in, and I think for someone to infer that
by virtue of participating in those activities, I have a conflict of interest, is to attempt
to intimidate me or others from participating in this public debate.
Back in Omaha, Julie, Dee and Adrian, dissatisfied with the health department's response, joined
a national activist group, the EMR Alliance.
They were babysat, and they were both diagnosed with cancer, and ten years prior to that there
was a child with them.
We do believe there is a cover-up and that they have known about the link with electromagnetic
fields and cancer for quite some years.
Certain individuals have the information and are able to protect themselves and their families.
It is not fair that the rest of the public does not have it.
They need to tell the truth.
Last year, Julie got the chance to make her views known to President Clinton when ABC
invited Kevin to the White House for a special children's town meeting.
In preparation for the program, ABC filmed Kevin in Omaha.
I just think it's a big cover-up.
There's just too many kids getting cancer around here.
There's 11 kids in this one-mile radius from the substation that has cancer, 11 of them.
The night before he was to appear with President Clinton, he became ill out in Washington and
had to be hospitalized.
So my other son took over for him on the show.
Patrick, you want to talk to the President?
I want to ask you his question.
I have heard that recent studies have linked EMFs to childhood cancers.
Other countries such as Sweden are passing laws to set standards as our President.
Can you help lower EMFs so hopefully some childhood cancers can be prevented?
That's something that we can do something about.
We had a study in 1990 which was inconclusive about it, but you're right, Sweden has concluded
that EMFs do lead to higher rates of cancer.
So I have asked the person who runs the Environmental Protection Agency for our government to do
a review of this and to make a report to me in the near future.
We just have to look into it and see whether we think there's honestly evidence there,
and if there is, then we have to take action and we're looking into it.
And you tell your brother to hang in there.
Kevin, I hope you're watching us and we're praying for you and pulling for you.
Five days later, Kevin, Patrick, and Julie were invited to the Oval Office to talk further
with President Clinton.
In my heart, I believe President Clinton is sympathetic to the children.
After meeting with him, I believe he's sympathetic, but I believe because of politics and large
industries, his hands are tied.
Two years before Julie's meeting at the White House, Congress had set aside funds, some
$65 million, for research to try and resolve the issue.
Because of the inconclusive epidemiology, research scientists like Gary Borman were
brought in to investigate EMFs in the laboratory.
Perhaps with carefully controlled scientific experiments, biologists would be able to unlock
the mystery of magnetic fields.
Borman realized that to get definitive answers, he had to attract first-class scientists.
You have to apply the same scientific standards to magnetic field research as you would to
any other field.
We're trying to get the best investigators we can to bring their resources and their
intellect to bear on this problem.
It's very difficult.
A lot of scientists would rather work on AIDS, breast cancer, other areas, and they're reluctant
to get involved in this field.
We're trying to get the best scientists involved, and we're having some luck in that regard.
One large grant went to the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
They built the largest rodent electromagnetic exposure facility in the world, capable of
exposing 3,000 animals at a time.
Our budget for this program is a little over $9 million.
The facility is constructed almost entirely of non-metallic materials.
All the wall and ceiling construction is wood, temperature, humidity, noise level, light
level are all controlled and monitored continuously.
The Earth's magnetic fields in all the rooms have been mapped very extensively.
We monitor the ambient fields in the rooms continuously.
So I think it's fair to say we've taken quite great pains to remove any potential confounders
from the program.
Two years ago, the center began a series of crucial studies to see if magnetic fields
caused birth defects or reproductive problems, to see if they caused or promoted cancer,
to discover if magnetic fields affected the immune system.
Unlike humans who are constantly exposed to 60 hertz magnetic fields, McCormick could
ensure that one group of rodents, the control group, would be completely unexposed.
Other groups would be exposed to different amounts of magnetic field from 20 milligauss
all the way up to a massive 10,000 milligauss, thousands of times the average exposure in
most homes.
If anything could detect an effect, at least in rodents, these experiments should.
Another exciting possibility that interested Boorman was that the magnetic fields were
subtly affecting cancer genes in totally novel ways, as Paul Brodeur had claimed.
While power line magnetic fields could not break DNA, some unconfirmed studies had claimed
that the fields might stimulate a certain cancer gene, increasing its activity and presumably
its likelihood of causing cancer.
Jeff Saffer, a young molecular biologist, was intrigued by this possibility, so a couple
of years ago he set out to try and validate the experiments.
He placed identical batches of human cells into two test chambers.
One batch of cells would be exposed to power line magnetic fields, the other would not.
Saffer's job was to measure precisely whether this field affected the activity of a cancer
gene called the mick gene.
If it did, it meant in principle there might be a mechanism by which EMFs could cause cancer.
Saffer knew that he had to be extremely careful.
Temperature, humidity, noise, and vibrations might affect the subtle changes he was looking
for.
His first effort failed.
Undaunted, he continued systematically searching for something he might have done wrong.
These efforts would take nearly two years.
By spring 1995, results from the different labs were beginning to come in.
The Electromagnetic Rodent Exposure Laboratory in Chicago had completed five studies.
First, the study looking at whether power line magnetic fields caused fetal abnormalities.
We evaluated a total of 3,000 animals.
We did complete skeletal evaluations, evaluations of the head, evaluations of all the visceral
organs, and that study was completely negative.
We found no adverse effects of the magnetic fields at all.
A reproductive study involving 12 litters from three generations of animals bred under
the magnetic fields was also over.
The end points we looked at were number of successful pregnancies, number of litters
which were actually delivered, number of pups per litter, birth weight, and a number of
other parameters to assess the health of the pups once they're delivered, and again the
results of that study demonstrated no effect of the magnetic fields on reproductive performance
in either sex.
Two cancer studies using specially bred cancer-prone mice were also finished.
Did the magnetic fields promote an already existing cancer?
Did the exposed animals get higher cancer rates?
Again we found no evidence that magnetic fields stimulated lymphoma production in either strain.
The EMF exposure had no effect.
Finally, the immunology study also came out negative.
One big study is still going on where rats will spend two years, essentially their whole
life, under the magnetic field.
This will test for a longer-term chronic effect.
The results will be known next year.
Meanwhile, at the Pacific Northwest Laboratories in Washington State, Jeff Saffer had gone
to great lengths to discover whether magnetic fields could directly influence the mick cancer
gene.
Through his best efforts, nothing had worked, but he refused to give up.
We went back and used different types of plastic ware to grow the cells that were different
geometries, different shapes.
We tried some higher field intensities, we tried some lower field intensities, we tried
different types of serum, we also tried different concentrations, and again could not find any
conditions under which the cells were responsive to magnetic fields.
Finally, Saffer took an extraordinary step.
He actually went to the laboratory of the investigator whose work he was trying to replicate.
We went to the laboratories in New York City that had done these experiments, used their
cells, used their culture vessel, their exposure system, and again were unable to find evidence
for a change in mick expression due to the magnetic field.
Saffer's conclusion was that the effects reported were not real, but probably resulted from
inadequate experimental controls.
Last month in the scientific journal Nature, a preliminary report of Saffer's work appeared.
The same issue carried a report from a team in Cambridge, England, who had also tried
and failed to find any effect.
Other studies have recently reported negative results.
A study into whether EMFs affect melatonin levels in humans, a hormone that's been linked
to breast cancer, found no effect.
A large study of pregnant women using electric blankets was also negative.
While other experiments are still underway, so far things don't look promising.
As you refine your studies, if there really is an effect, the effect should increase,
it should become stronger, it should become more focused.
And if you cannot, with repeated studies and with better studies, you continue not to find
an effect or find only marginal effects, then it becomes obvious that there's really nothing
there.
When completed, these studies will help Congress decide what, if any, action to take.
But Paul Brodeur doesn't believe laboratory studies should drive health policy.
Laboratory studies are not going to be the criteria upon which we base preventive public
health measures.
We have used the epidemiology as the only viable tool for implementing preventive public
health measures.
It is the only viable tool.
But in the face of so much negative laboratory data, can epidemiology alone prove that cancers
like the one Kevin Laram has are caused by EMFs?
One thing most epidemiologists agree on, even the ones who support a link between EMFs and
cancer, is that the kind of lay epidemiology that the Omaha parents have done is unsound.
They had identified four zip codes in Omaha which appear to have two to three times more
cancer than average, and these zip codes are crisscrossed with power lines.
It looks impressive, but for two things.
First, according to their map, only three of the cases actually live within 300 feet
of a power line, and power line fields fall off to tiny levels within this distance.
But there is a second more crucial weakness to this lay epidemiology.
Cancers do not fall evenly across the landscape.
Even if there is no carcinogenic agent in the environment, just by random chance, some
zip codes will get more cases than average.
Others will get less.
For example, this densely populated zip code a few miles away has just five cancer cases,
less than half the expected number, and it too is crisscrossed with power lines.
In many of the cluster investigations where cases are taking place in time and space,
these events most likely are happening by chance.
And if you draw artificial boundaries around a cluster in time and place, it's like the
Texas sharpshooter.
Epidemiologists like to tell their students the cautionary tale of the Texas sharpshooter.
He takes his gun, shoots at the side of the barn and then draws a bullseye around it afterwards
and then says, aha, I have a bullseye.
Drawing artificial boundaries in space and time, such as cancers occurring in certain
zip codes during certain time periods, can create an illusion of a cluster.
In fact, like the sharpshooter's bullets, cancers are usually scattered randomly throughout
the landscape.
Even scientists who support an EMF cancer link agree it's not valid scientifically.
By statistics alone, it's very possible that there will be a number of cancers in one block
and none in the next ten blocks.
And if one wants to try to identify sources of cancer, what one must do is study many,
many children.
That's just what a number of investigators did.
Over the past 15 years, a series of residential studies, each involving thousands of children,
have been done.
The results have been controversial because, depending on how exposure from powerline EMFs
was estimated, epidemiologists either found or did not find associations with childhood
cancer.
Like the occupational studies of electrical workers, the typical risk ratios reported
in these studies were low, around two or less.
Too low, most epidemiologists felt, to prove an effect.
But in 1992, a landmark study appeared from Sweden.
A huge investigation.
It enrolled everyone living within 300 meters of Sweden's high-voltage transmission line
system over a 25-year period.
They went far beyond all previous studies in their efforts to measure magnetic fields,
calculating the fields that the children were exposed to at the time of their cancer diagnosis
and before.
This study reported an apparently clear association between magnetic field exposure and childhood
leukemia, with a risk ratio for the most highly exposed of nearly four.
The Swedish government announced it was investigating new policy options, including whether to move
children away from schools near powerlines.
Surely, here was the proof that powerlines were dangerous.
The proof that even the physicists and biological naysayers would have to accept.
But three years after the study was published, the Swedish research no longer looked so unassailable.
This is a copy of the original contractor's report, which reveals the remarkable thoroughness
of the Swedish team.
Unlike the published article, which just summarizes part of the data, the report shows everything
they did in great detail.
All the things they measured, and all the comparisons they made.
When scientists saw how many things they had measured, nearly 800 risk ratios are
in the report.
They began accusing the Swedes of falling into one of the most fundamental errors in
epidemiology, sometimes called the multiple comparisons fallacy.
The problem is, when you do as they did, hundreds and hundreds of comparisons, something enabled
800 different comparisons.
By the standard way we do statistics, we would expect five percent of those to be statistically
elevated and five percent to be statistically decreased.
And now you have a problem.
If you find by one measure of exposure that leukemia is up in a group of kids, is that
real or is that the result of just random noise in the system?
In their thoroughness, the Swedes had created their own version of the Texas sharpshooter
problem.
Even if nothing is going on due to power lines, if you measure hundreds of risk ratios they
will scatter by random chance around a mean of one.
Some will be above and some below.
Risk ratios below one suggest that EMFs protect against cancer.
Above one, that they increase the cancer rate.
But the published article focused only on the strongest positive risk ratios.
The summary highlights a nearly four-fold increase in risk of childhood leukemia.
This is what the press picks up and the public hears.
It is not scientifically reasonable to do all the measurements, but then only pick out
the ones that give you the answer you want for publication.
If I dredge through their original report, I can find situations which looked at in isolation
without looking at the rest of the report, that if that was the only data I gave you,
I could claim that that proved that power lines protected children against childhood
leukemia.
It is analogous to the Texas sharpshooter.
What we're searching for in any research is truth.
That search for truth argues for being rigorous, having clearly documented your methods, and
not withholding any information, not using the information in a selective way.
How many of the EMF studies commit this error is unclear.
Original contractors' reports are rarely available, yet the issue is fundamental.
Outside of epidemiology, most scientists are unanimous.
You cannot confuse a study that tests a hypothesis with one that generates them.
Epidemiologists should decide what they are going to look for and write it down before
they make the search.
Just what they're going to look for and just how they're going to look for it.
Then after they make their analysis, they will find two sets of things.
They will find answers to the questions they had asked, and now we have a situation where
one can analyze properly the statistical significance of those answers.
They will also have answers to questions which weren't asked.
Odd things may show up, and that's very interesting too, but we separate those in another category.
We call those hypothesis-generating experiments.
If you want to say whether that's really a real result or just a fluctuation, then you
must do a second experiment where that is on your list of things to look at.
This may be a weakness in the album study.
I'm not familiar with it myself.
There are weaknesses to be found in all of the epidemiological studies.
You can take any given epidemiological study, and I saw the asbestos industry do this time
and again.
As it comes over the horizon, gets published, you can shoot it down with all kinds of stuff.
They're trying to shoot down the Canadian study now, but the totality of these studies
suggests a pervasive major public health problem that needs to be dealt with and that I believe
will have to be dealt with because the American people will demand that it be dealt with.
In the face of negative biology and contentious epidemiology, what should lawmakers do to
protect people from a risk that may well not be there?
Peter Vollberg is an expert in risk assessment.
One thing he says is certain.
Even supposing there is a risk, the fact that it has been so hard to prove that power line
magnetic fields cause cancer means that by definition, any risk cannot be very large.
Even assuming the Swedish study were true, the increased risk to children of getting
a very rare cancer like leukemia is of the order of one in a million.
Would moving them to another school make them safer?
On the one hand, you might argue that if you believe there is an elevated risk from the
adjacent nature of the power lines that you could move the children out.
But if this in fact involves putting them on a vehicle such as a bus and driving them
a mile or so, we know from real actuarial statistics that being on a bus does carry
some real health hazards in terms of injury and death.
The EMF risk is likely very small.
It's hypothetical on several bases, whereas the risk from getting in a car is very concrete.
It's very real.
We can actually appreciate that and we know how to calculate that.
And to say that you're going to incur these concrete risks in order to avoid this very
low hypothetical risk doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
And in fact, the Swedish authorities now agree.
In reflection, they decided not to make any policy changes based on the 1992 study.
So should President Clinton follow the Swedes and do nothing?
Not according to David Carpenter.
There's too much smoke here.
There's got to be a fire.
While I admit that the proof is not 100 percent, there is consistency in correlation between
leukemia and brain tumors and exposure to magnetic fields, both in residential and occupational
settings.
So I do not believe that doing nothing is appropriate.
Amidst the public controversy for Dee and Julie, there is good personal news.
In a happy reversal of fortune, both Kevin and Jonathan's cancers are in remission and
their future looks very promising.
Thanks to major advances in childhood cancer therapy, nearly two-thirds of childhood cancers
are now curable.
But they have not changed their beliefs about EMFs.
Our human body is very complex.
It will be years before scientists understand it more, and they will never understand it
completely the way God put us together.
There is significant studies that do show that electromagnetic fields make changes,
and that's what I believe in.
And do they have any doubts they're on the right track?
No.
None at all.
I'm 100 percent sure.
Rightly or wrongly, power lines are now part of a long list of environmental agents that
the public fears.
While unproven, these fears, once established, are hard to erase.
Reducing anxieties is far, far more difficult than inciting anxieties.
I think it partly hinges on a difficulty that people have with understanding numbers.
I mean, you can say the risk is high, the risk is low, and so forth.
But the quantitative differences are difficult for people to appreciate.
But why would people fear power lines more than established risks, such as smoking and
driving?
What are the big risks that people seem to be totally unafraid of, like driving a car,
versus the small risks they appear to be very afraid of?
The differences seem to be people are less afraid of risks they think they control.
And they're less afraid of risks that they think they understand.
So the things that people are most afraid of is things they can't control and don't
understand.
And certainly power lines fall right in that category.
A society must pay a price for its fears, whether they are real or imaginary.
The power line controversy is costing an estimated $1 billion a year, money, critics argue, that
could be much better spent elsewhere.
The total cost to our society was this nonsense, this unreasoning fear of electromagnetic fields.
It was a serious drag on our economy and in some sense on our civilization.
And it's like the little boy who calls wolf all the time.
In one of these days a real wolf is going to come and people are going to be so used
to the imaginary wolves that they're going to miss the real wolf.
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The O.J. Simpson trial shifted from dry testimony about DNA...
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