Does electromagnetic radiation from high energy power installations have negative effects on health?

Question

Note that I'm not asking about high energy RADAR and telecommunications installations or similar systems which can cook small animals alive.

I've heard lots of stories about negative health effects of electromagnetic radiation generated by electrical generation, transmission and distribution systems, such as increased risk of cancer and leukemia for people living near electrical substations and power plants.

I'm personally not a fan of the theory, but I've seen some research results which could be interpreted both ways, so this looked like a nice question for this site.

Answer 1

Quackwatch has a great article on this subject, which gives reasons to not believe power lines are health hazards:

1. The fields produced by power lines are very small. Power lines produce both electric and magnetic fields. The electric field is greatly reduced in magnitude within the human body, because the body is an electrical conductor. In fact, power lines produce electric fields inside the human body that are much smaller than the electric fields that normally exist in the body. The magnetic field is not significantly shielded inside the human body, so the only realistic possibility of health effects come from the magnetic field. The magnetic fields from power lines are rather small. Typically they are about 2 milliGauss. By comparison, the earth's field is typically 300-500 milliGauss, with the exact value depending on the location on the surface of the earth. Magnetic fields from power lines are therefore hundreds of times smaller than the magnetic field from the earth. If the relatively weak magnetic fields from power lines had significant adverse health effects, you would expect the much stronger magnetic field from earth to be devastating. Yet no such effect has ever been found. In experiments on animals, mice have lived for several generations in 60 Hz magnetic fields as high as 10,000 milliGauss, thousands of times higher typical power line fields, without any adverse effects.

   It is well known that fluctuating magnetic fields give rise to an electric field by the Faraday effect in physics. Yale physics professor Robert Adair demonstrated that these electric fields are very small in comparison with the naturally occurring electric fields arising from thermal fluctuations [12]. This is a good benchmark to indicate that the powerline magnetic fields can't be important.

2. No plausible mechanism for adverse health effects has been postulated. It is well known that electromagnetic fields at high frequencies (e.g., ultraviolet light) can have adverse biological effects. This is why sunlight is a good disinfectant: it kills bacteria. However, the frequency of power line fields (60 cycles per second, or 60 Hz) is too low to have this effect by many orders of magnitude.

3. The initial study was flawed. Wertheimer and Leeper did not actually measure magnetic fields from power lines. Instead, they classified the homes according to their wiring code. The wiring code was then used as a surrogate for the powerline magnetic field, which was unmeasured and unknown. This is a flaw in the study. Later studies actually measured the magnetic fields from power lines and found no consistent relationship between measured magnetic field and incidence of cancer [13]. It is important to realize that there are important possible confounding factors in such epidemiologic studies. For example, one possible confounding factor is an income effect. Living right under electric power lines is not a desired residence, and often is a low-income housing location. People living near power lines tend to be poorer than the control group, and there is a strong and well-known epidemiological relationship between poverty and cancer. Gurney and others showed that the homes with the presumably higher-current wiring code tended to be lower income [14]. Thus the original Wertheimer-Leeper study was biased. In addition, it was based on relatively few cases, and the statistics were consequently rather poor.

   Later epidemiologic studies were properly designed, and some were much larger in scale. For example, the government of Finland performed a huge study of 134,800 children, with one million person-years of exposure. There were 140 cancers in the group, 5 fewer than would be expected by chance [15].

   Consequently, the epidemiologic studies, taken as a whole, consist of a few early low-quality studies, some of which yielded positive effects, and later, higher-quality studies, which yielded negative studies. If power lines really caused cancer, it is natural to expect the later studies to confirm the earlier studies. Instead, this has all the earmarks of a nonexistent effect.

4. The incidence of leukemia has been decreasing. During the last few decades, the use of electric power and electric appliances has increased the 60 Hz powerline magnetic fields to which we Americans are exposed by roughly a factor of twenty. If power line fields were a significant cause of leukemia, there should have been a dramatic rise in leukemia. Leukemia rates, however, have slowly decreased. As noted by the physicist J.D. Jackson, this argues against any significant causal relationship [16].

Answer 2

This recent EU-sponsored study on the epidemiological effects of exposure to electromagnetic fields suggests that there is a causal link between exposure to electromagnetic radiation from power lines and childhood leukemia (and possibly also Alzheimer's disease) for electromagnetic flux density exceeding 100 micro teslas. Taking that average high tension power distribution lines are running around 400kV, the flux density can easily exceed that threshold within a few hundred meters radius. The study found no association with other types of cancer or cardiovascular disease. There are also well known links between EMF exposure and migraines/headaches, dizziness, and depression (also cited within the EU study on page 27).

Answer 3

Bit of a devil's advocate one here.

There has been some research on grounding the human body, and the associated health benefits:

• Grounding the human body to neutralize bio-electrical stress from static electricity and EMFs, A. Clinton Ober, ESD Journal, HTML version

To throw some numbers out:

The method to effectively ground people while in bed was developed and the study began. The effort produced, with a control group, the following results:

85% went to sleep quicker

93% reported sleeping better throughout the night

100% reported waking, being and feeling more rested

82% experienced a significant reduction in muscle stiffness

74% experienced the elimination of/or a reduction of chronic back and joint pain

78% reported improved general health

Now if this research into grounding is correct and the human body can store up charge then it is quite plausible that electromagnetic radiation could increase the charge levels in our bodies.

If you couple this with the reports that being grounding help wounds heal quicker you could say that it does have a negative affect on our body because it reduces our bodies ability to heal itself effectivly.

Another link to research in this area:

• Dick Brown, Gaétan Chevalier, and Michael Hill. Pilot Study on the Effect of Grounding on Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. March 2010, 16(3): 265-273. doi:10.1089/acm.2009.0399.