Re: Question: EMF Researcher Made Up Data, ORI Says (Science, 2 July, 1999)

[RuthWeiner@AOL.COM]

I don't want to repeat everything.  However, exposure must include exposure distance.  A person in a house is, I would guess, 40 to 50 meters from and overhead power line, and is  electromagnetically shielded by, if nothing else, the electrical wiring in the house and the metal gutters and chimney and skylight flashing.  A person using an electric appliance (and just to get away from that hair drier, let's include the vacuum cleaner, the various fan motors,  blender, hedge trimmer, etc),  is a meter or less from the appliance and is unshielded.   (How about the starter solenoid in a car? the motor that raises and lowers car windows? the generator light on my bicycle?)


One of the papers on the website (Beale) et al, gives powerline exposure inside a house as 0.57 to 19.4 mG with an average of the Beale et al quintiles being about 4 mG.  A hair drier is 13 to 35 mG, and I would guess a vacuum cleaner would be about the same.  So about 4 hours per day exposure to appliances with motors would be about the same kind of exposure as from a powerline.  My own exposure to household appliance motors today was actually about 3 hours, and I do not use, or even own, a hair drier,  So the exposures seem to me to be comparable. 


I did read the peer revierwed articles available on the web site.  These are studies that take a putative environmental insult -- exposure to magnetic fields from powerlines -- and look for health effects that might be correlated.  


In the cited article by Li et al:  Table 2 of the paper shows that 18% of the women with maximum exposure >16 mG miscarried, but only 10% with maximum exposure <16mG miscarried.  However, when the total exposures (field*exposure time) were compared, there was little difference between the three bins: 160-1079mG-sec: 17.5% miscarriages, 1080-4759 mG-sec: 18.1%,>4759, 19.7%.  The paper claims to have corrected for all confounding factors but gives no details of the correction method.  Also, Table 1 of the paper shows that the reported rate of previous spontaneous miscarriage (before the study) is 20% for both the <16mG and the >16 mG group.


The Beale, et al, paper claims a "weak association" between chronic illness, asthma, Type-II diabetes and powerline exposure, and discusses variations and reversals in the trend at some length.  (On a personal note:  my husband was diagnosed with Type-II diabetes, and we can't figure out if it is a disease or if he has it, and there is no good agreement on the diagnosis).


The Villeneuve study of glioblastoma is a study of occupational exposure (I didn't read it through)


Ruth Weiner, Ph. D.

ruthweiner@aol.com