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Last month at a meeting in San Diego, two groups of Swedish researchers made headlines when they presented data that seemed to show that electromagnetic fields (EMFs) of the kind generated by power transmission lines and other electrical equipment can cause cancer. It was hot news, because while several epidemiological studies in the past 13 years have found an association between EMFs and cancer, those studies had been criticized for a lack of precision in measuring exposure to the fields. The Swedish studies, on the other hand, drew from databases that more accurately record past exposure of individuals to EMFs, and the researchers compensated for other methodological flaws that had dogged previous studies. "No one has had this kind of data before," enthuses Berkeley epidemiologist Raymond Neutra.
Newspapers and magazines seized on the as yet unpublished Swedish findings as evidence that EMFs pose an invisible threat to health lurking in backyards all across the world. But do they? Not according to another recent authoritative source: a report from the Committee on Interagency Radiation Research and Policy Coordination (CIRRPC), part of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Undertaken at the request of the Department of Labor after a series of alarming articles by writer Paul Brodeur in The New Yorker in 1989 and 1990, the White House review states that "there is no convincing evidence in the published literature to support the contention that exposures to extremely low frequency electric and magnetic fields (ELFEMF) generated by sources such as household appliances, video display terminals, and local powerlines are demonstrable health hazards."
Who's right, you ask? Well, there isn't an easy answer. Welcome to the tortured world of EMF research, where deeply held points of view function like opposite poles, and between them stretches a powerful force field that whips the lay media into a frenzy. What keeps the force field strong is a lack of conclusive data to settle the EMF-cancer question. Some scientists think the question ought to be pursued quickly, with more epidemiological studies and research aimed at finding a biological mechanism by which the EMFs could cause cancer. But the authors of the OSTP report say that, compared with AIDS and breast cancer, EMF research just doesn't deserve a...