LYNN SURGALLA

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LYNN SURGALLA

TROUBLE IN THE AIR
ARE WE AWASH IN CANCER-CAUSING ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS? THE EXPERTS
ARE SEARCHING FOR THE ANSWER.

Published on August 25, 1991
Author: LINE: SCOTT THOMAS

News features copy desk chief
© The Buffalo News Inc.

Imagine, for a moment, that you're an electromagnetic field.

It wouldn't be a bad life. You'd crop up anywhere -- radiating from power lines, glowing out from household appliances. Anywhere an electric current passed through a wire, you'd be there.

You could go through walls. The more electricity was involved, the stronger you'd be.

recorded late November 2006

And you'd be absolutely everywhere in the developed world, from the mightiest corporations to the most intimate bedrooms.

One little unpleasantness: Scientists are worried about you.

You might be killing people.

And you might be causing brain tumors, miscarriages, learning disorders . . . they're coming up with new suspicions all the time.

So what's your problem?

If you're an electromagnetic field, you have an image problem, that's what.

Trouble on Electric Avenue

It has been little more than a century since Thomas Edison first got a tiny light bulb to glow in his New Jersey laboratory; since then, America has pursued electrification with missionary zeal. Electricity has given us television, given us computers, given us the Cuisinart.

It also has given us electromagnetic fields, or EMFs. The experts have known about them from the beginning. But it's only recently that they've gotten alarmed about what this continuous bath of EMFs is doing to our bodies.

First, a little background. Stay with us here -- it'll be painless.

When current passes through a wire, a field radiates out from that wire. It's a law of physics, as immutable as gravity.

But man-made EMFs are relatively weak -- far weaker than the Earth's own natural electromagnetic field. (The planet is magnetized, remember? That's what makes a compass point toward the North Pole.) For example, the Earth's background radiation is five times as strong as the highest allowable EMF at the edge of the right of way around high-tension power lines.

So if the Earth itself hasn't poisoned us by now, with millennia of human history behind us, why worry about these wimpy man-made fields?

The difference is frequency.

The juice that comes out of your wall socket is alternating current, so named because it alternates -- changes direction back and forth -- right there in the wires.

It does that flip-flop 60 times a second, so its frequency is 60 hertz. In fact, every inch of North America's vast electric grid -- from the biggest humming, hissing high-tension power lines to the blender on your kitchen counter -- operates at a frequency of 60 hertz.

But the Earth's frequency -- the one humankind evolved in, the one our bodies are naturally in tune with -- is 7.8 hertz.

"What's happened is that we have all these unnatural frequencies now," says Lynn A. Surgalla, an expert on EMFs who with her husband, Thomas F. Valone, runs Integrity Research Corp. in Buffalo. "The odds are that a lot of them are toxic."

Death by wire

The scary newspaper headlines and journal articles began appearing after a 1979 report by two epidemiologists in Denver, Nancy Wertheimer and Ed Leeper. The researchers had gotten hold of a list of Denver children who died of leukemia, then studied how near the children had lived to heavy-duty power distribution lines.

Stained bone marrow aspirate smear of patient with precursor B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

What they found surprised them: Children who lived nearest to the power lines were twice as likely to develop leukemia as children who lived farther away. What's more, the researchers related this doubling of cancer risk to what seemed an impossibly low level of exposure to EMFs: just 3 milligauss. (By comparison, an ordinary ceiling fan typically produces as much as 11 milligauss.)

The implications were frightening. If exposure to that low level of EMFs meant a risk of cancer, then every last person in the United States was running that risk at some point of the day, if not all day long.

EMFs immediately became a hot topic for scientists.

In New York State, a $5 million research project that ended in 1987 produced similar findings. One part of the project was a statistical study by University of North Carolina researcher David Savitz, again conducted in Denver. It showed a distinct correlation between living near power lines and cancer in children.

And in June of this year, a study of telephone linemen conducted at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, found that linemen who were exposed to the strongest electromagnetic fields in their work were almost twice as likely to develop leukemia as their less heavily exposed colleagues.

It takes a lot of evidence to convince a scientist, though, and the debate is far from over. Dozens of studies are under way. These include more epidemiology, in which researchers use statistical evidence to try to find a correlation between EMFs and illness; and laboratory research that seeks to discover just how the fields affect the human body.

As government at all levels continues to crash and burn around us, though, there isn't a whole lot of money available to pay for these studies. As a result, the nation's biggest sponsor of EMF research is the Electric Power Research Institute -- a trade organization funded by U.S. electric utilities.

Did someone say "conflict of interest"? After all, America's power companies have a lot to lose if it turns out that their product has been killing their customers. The liability lawsuits would be crippling, not to mention the costs of reconfiguring the nation's entire electric system.

Well, the institute insists that its research protocols are carefully designed to be objective. It says it exercises no control over publication of results by the scientists working on its EMF studies.

But some critics remain suspicious.

"You really have a problem in the sense that there are very powerful forces arrayed against making this a subject for lay consumption," says Dr. Robert O. Becker, who has written widely on EMF effects. Becker, twice nominated for the Nobel Prize, is a professor at the State University of New York's Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse and at Louisiana State University Medical Center.

"But people are convinced that something is for real," Becker says. "I don't think it's a problem that can be put back in the box."

"The epidemiological evidence that's coming out is ever stronger that there is a relationship between this force in our environment and some forms of cancer."

Radical cells

A relationship. There's the rub. Even if statistics indicate that EMFs and cancer are related, and greater exposure to the fields correlates with greater incidence of cancer, that doesn't necessarily mean the fields cause the illness.

The classic analogy is of the rooster and the sunrise. When the sun comes up, the rooster crows. You can depend on it. But . . . does the rooster cause the sun to rise?

What the laboratory scientists are looking for is the mechanism: how EMFs might affect the body.

One theory is that the fields affect the pineal gland. This gland is in the middle of your forehead; it has been called the "third eye." It regulates the immune system (as well as the fertility cycle in women) by secreting the hormone melatonin.

Other research seems to show that EMF exposure inhibits the flow of calcium in cells. Calcium plays a role in regulating cell division; the growth of cancer depends on the cancer cells' ability to divide uncontrollably.

Lynn Surgalla says a theory that has gained some credence among scientists suggests that exposure to 60 hertz EMFs works to promote cancer, rather than induce healthy cells to mutate.

Human tissues have their individual resonant frequencies just as the Earth does, Surgalla says. Even in healthy people, she says, cells are mutating all the time -- because of environmental toxins, X-rays or just random screw-ups in the DNA.

Normally, the immune system swiftly kills off the abnormal cells.


Operating power plants of north America

"But when an artificial frequency enters the body that matches a cell's resonance," she says, "it sends an artificial message to the cell that may cause it to do inappropriate things." It might be, she says, that mutations may somehow get "hidden" from the immune system and thus are able to grow into a full-fledged cancer.

But as the laboratory research continues, some critics are saying the statistical correlations alone are cause for alarm.

As author and EMF expert Paul Brodeur says by the way of comparison, scientists still haven't discovered the exact mechanism by which inhaled asbestos fibers produce lung cancer. But they're darned sure it's happening.

Qualified denials

The electric utilities say they want the truth, and they all contribute to Electric Power Research Institute studies of electromagnetic fields.

They put their own best spin on the problem for public consumption, of course, expressing the sincere hope that further research will lead to a definitive answer.

The utilities also point out that fields generated by household appliances can be much stronger than those from power lines, and that there have been lots of statistical and laboratory studies that show no correlation between EMFs and cancer.

But they're clearly on the defensive.

"The utilities are cognizant that the public is concerned about this issue," says J. Edward Kaish, co-chairman of Niagara Mohawk Power Corp.'s EMF task force, in Syracuse. "But there are no known or established scientific standards (for safe EMF exposure levels). Until we get conclusive scientific evidence, I don't think we can take a position on it one way or the other."

Western New York's other consumer electric utility, New York State Electric & Gas Corp., says in a position paper: "Our current knowledge does not indicate conclusively that low-frequency EMFs pose a hazard to human health. . . . We believe that more research results are needed before society can make sound decisions about EMFs."

And what would happen if electromagnetic fields are conclusively demonstrated to be a threat to health? The utilities might be forced to find ways to shield their customers. The cost would be enormous -- and the companies would pass it along to the people they serve. That's you and me, ratepayer.

The legal mayhem that would result would become another expensive headache. Already, enterprising lawyers are filing suit for plaintiffs claiming injury from EMF exposure. In May, a California couple sued San Diego Gas & Electric, charging that their 4-year-old daughter contracted two kinds of kidney cancer because she was exposed to power-line electromagnetic fields before birth.

A glowing future

If a threat to health can be conclusively demonstrated -- and the laboratory scientists are a long way from that, perhaps years -- what happens to this web of electricity in which we have enveloped ourselves?

Becker suggests that, in new construction, the utilities commit themselves to burying power lines; this can be done in a way that would effectively eliminate the electromagnetic fields they produce. He also says decentralizing the power-distribution system -- building more intermediate substations of equal power, rather than "stepping down" the current from a high-power source at one end -- would greatly reduce EMF emissions.

Surgalla imagines a more radical approach: finding a frequency other than 60 hertz that can be demonstrated not to affect human tissues, then switching the nation's electric system -- from power plants to blenders -- over to that frequency.

Such a transformation would be horrendously expensive, but the concentration of electromagnetic fields is only getting denser. And there's bad news for high-tech fans: The next generation of electrical transmission, superconductors, will bring about an exponential increase in the intensity of EMFs.

For now, says Becker, it's difficult not to be concerned. "We know enough to say . . . that this is something that is of considerable concern from a public health standpoint. It's not just in my back yard, it's in everyone's back yard.

"Every urban environment is a real jungle of electromagnetic frequencies, usually serviced by an electric utility grid that dates back to pre-World War II. This is a far greater (risk) than things like asbestos, toxic waste, nuclear emissions from power plants. Most all of the other problems are local in nature. This one is ubiquitous."

And it's only just begun.

JOHN RUSSELL/Buffalo News

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