Re: E-M fields health risks

[Doug Craigen <dcc@ESCAPE.CA>]

"Shapiro, Mark" wrote:
> > From a public health point-of-view the risks from EM radiation from power
> lines probably is much lower than the risks encountered from the generation
> of the electricity in the first place.

Of course, one takes reasonable measures against any risks with the
degree of the measures scaled to the degree of risk.  After all, life is
risky.  Try finding anything with no risk.  If you exercise you can kill
your knees (etc.).  Don't exercise and you run yet another set of health
risks.  The fact that something is risky doesn't mean you avoid it, it
means you weigh the risks of doing versus the risks of not doing.

When a smoker says something like "yeah, but hot dogs give lab rats
cancer too" the might be acting facetious, but they might also be
expressing a sincere case of paralysis due to information overload.
Perhaps we scientists might do the world a better service by teaching
people about relative risk rather than producing study after study to
demonstrate the simple fact that everything has risk.

So is it worth the effort of arranging your household furniture to avoid
power cables in the walls and running to appliances?  Somehow I doubt
it.  As Bill Beaty pointed out, there are a lot of other things that
should rank higher on my to-do list based on relative risk even in the
worst case scenarios presented.  Its been a few years since I've looked
into this data.  At that time the fears were based on studies which
hadn't been adjusted for basic socio-economic factors such as power
lines normally running through poorer and industrialized areas, and that
along with power lines comes such things as leakage from transformers.
What I was told at the time was that studies that accounted for these
factors found no health risk over and above statistical noise due to the
power itself.

\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\

Doug Craigen
          http://www.dctech.com/physics/about_dc.html