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A look into whether a high incidence of cancer in an Omaha neighborhood is due to an electric substation located there.

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00:00What is your daily exposure to electromagnetic fields?
00:10Should you be worried?
00:15Tonight on Frontline, find out in Currents of Fear.
00:28Funding for Frontline is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
00:41and by annual financial support from viewers like you.
00:47This is Frontline.
00:58Imagine an environmental agent to which everyone is exposed day and night.
01:09An agent that is invisible, odorless and silent.
01:15An agent that affects young and old alike at work and at play.
01:20Now imagine that this agent has been linked in dozens of studies to various cancers,
01:25but that the authorities have taken no action to protect their citizens.
01:31Some people believe this is what is happening now in America.
01:35The threat they see comes from the electromagnetic fields produced by the more than 2 million miles of power lines that crisscross the country.
01:43I think there is a major public health hazard here.
01:47I think the evidence to date clearly shows it.
01:50I think it is an unforgivably stupid public health policy to say that before we implement any kind of preventive measures,
01:59we should continue to study this for another 5 or 10 years in the laboratory.
02:05Omaha, Nebraska, like everywhere, depends on electricity.
02:15More to drink?
02:16The Larm family never questioned it until 1992.
02:21In February of 1992, my oldest son, Kevin, was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia.
02:28That very day, in tears, I wanted to know what caused this cancer because I was afraid for all my children.
02:39Julie Larm took Kevin to the Omaha Children's Hospital to be treated.
02:46There, she encountered other children with cancers, like Jonathan Hendricks and his mother Dee.
02:59Dee was startled by the number of kids at the clinic with cancer.
03:03In going through the oncology clinic here in Omaha Children's Hospital, I was blown away.
03:09In fact, I was in tears by the amount of other children that were suffering from cancer.
03:16I could not get out of my mind the faces of all the other bald-headed babies.
03:24When I knew instantly that this was not a normal thing going on,
03:29I wondered what it was in my neighborhood or in Omaha that could have possibly caused my son to have cancer.
03:36And driving home one night, I noticed that there were huge transmission towers that were scattered throughout the neighborhood.
03:43Julie and Dee became friends and soon were contacted by other concerned citizens like Adrian.
03:52I was diagnosed with herparamophilia. I was diagnosed with Addison's disease.
03:57I've had seven unexplained miscarriages.
04:01I've been diagnosed with cancer. I've had a complete hysterectomy.
04:06My parents lived 50 foot from a 160-volt line tower.
04:13We grew up as children playing, having tea parties, whatever, under that.
04:20Their suspicions that power lines had something to do with all these health problems
04:24were apparently confirmed when a few months later they saw a segment of the CBS News magazine Street Stories
04:31about the dangers of electromagnetic fields, or EMFs.
04:35A man has died from cancer.
04:37On the trail of a mystery.
04:39The program featured a school in California where teachers had abnormally high cancer rates
04:45and a landmark Swedish study showing that children living near power lines had up to four times the risk of childhood leukemia.
04:53Immediately after this landmark study was released, the Swedish government and the power companies
04:58accepted the connection between electromagnetic fields and cancer.
05:03Also interviewed was a senior public health official, Dr. David Carpenter.
05:08I feel very strongly about this issue because I really feel people are dying from exposure to magnetic fields
05:14that could easily be avoided.
05:16So I called the health department the next day.
05:19They told me I had to gather the names and diagnosis for as many children as we could before they would start an investigation.
05:27So we began a telephone line of calling parents that we knew and then they would in turn call parents
05:34and we got a list of eleven children that lived within one mile of the substation that had been diagnosed with cancer within the last seven years.
05:42So then we called the health department back and they in turn then did an investigation.
05:47We are getting an official map with the lines.
05:52While they waited for the health department, they began plotting cancers on a map
05:57and reading everything they could find on the health effects of magnetic fields.
06:02One author that caught their attention was pioneering environmental journalist Paul Brodeur.
06:07He had written about similar EMF cancer clusters in Connecticut and California.
06:12My name is Paul Brodeur.
06:16I've been a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine for the past 35 years.
06:21I was the journalist who first alerted the nation to the health hazard posed by asbestos.
06:26For Brodeur, EMFs were simply the latest of a series of environmental toxins that industry and government had tried to conceal from the public.
06:35It's pervasive.
06:37You literally have millions of unsuspecting men, women and children exposed to power frequency magnetic fields
06:47that have already been associated in dozens upon dozens of studies conducted and published in the peer-reviewed medical literature levels that are associated with the development of cancer.
07:01Never before has there been this much epidemiological evidence of the carcinogenicity of any agent.
07:12And that evidence subsequently declared to be invalid.
07:16And that agent subsequently declared to be benign.
07:20By the time Julie Dee and Adrian met with the Nebraska Health Department, they had become convinced there was a serious problem with the power lines in their neighborhood.
07:33And they were in no mood to be patronized.
07:35We used your map.
07:38Let's put our dots on.
07:40These are the four zip codes outlined in yellow.
07:43These are substations.
07:45Okay.
07:46Something's going on in this neighborhood.
07:49There's too many dots that represent families that are being torn apart by cancers.
07:53There's too many 17-month-old bald-headed babies in the neighborhood.
07:57And we're going to scream until someone figures out what's going on in this neighborhood.
08:02You know, the truth of the matter is, is that almost without exception, cancer cluster investigations don't come up with anything.
08:11They don't find a risk factor or, you know, a series of risk factors that might be responsible for what, you know, for the increase in the number of cases of cancer.
08:26When the head of the health department failed to turn up to this meeting, Adrian became angry.
08:31Those are people.
08:33My sister dying of brain cancer.
08:36I watched her rot in Mayo Clinic for a year.
08:40And then a head of a health department doesn't come to the meeting?
08:44That's baloney.
08:46We get lied to.
08:47We get ignored.
08:48We have to go get our own information.
08:50We have to make our own maps.
08:52We have to find out about substations.
08:54That is not what our elected officials are for.
08:59We're getting screwed from both sides.
09:02The Omaha mother's concerns are shared by this man, Dr. David Carpenter, Dean of the School of Public Health at the State University of New York, Albany.
09:11Carpenter has been convinced for almost a decade that EMFs pose a genuine risk.
09:17In my judgment, they are dangerous.
09:20Up to 15% of all cases of childhood cancer might be attributable to exposure to magnetic fields from the power lines in the street.
09:30But not everyone agrees that power line magnetic fields are dangerous.
09:36The group most skeptical of Carpenter's claims are engineers and physicists,
09:41who argue that the laws of electricity and magnetism discovered a century ago are among the best understood theories in science.
09:49So those sparks are being produced by about one and a half million volts of electricity.
09:54But I can touch the inside, metal on the inside with my bare hands.
10:00So much so that museum staff entrust their lives to those principles every day, demonstrating them to children.
10:06And there's probably nothing on Earth or in the universe that we understand as well as electromagnetic fields,
10:14and the interaction of electromagnetic fields with matter, including biological matter.
10:20All of chemistry and almost all of biology, excepting a few gravitational effects, are electrical.
10:29Bob Adair and his colleague Bill Bennett are professors of physics at Yale University.
10:34A few years ago they became interested in this area, and the more they studied it, the more skeptical they became.
10:40The notion that power line electromagnetic fields could cause disease seemed on the face of it to be scientifically impossible.
10:48The thing that struck me most puzzling about it is that the fields these people were dealing with are absolutely minuscule.
10:55They're talking about fields of two or three milligauss, fields that are one two hundredth or so of the Earth's magnetic fields.
11:02In the back deck, the milligauss readings, today they're kind of low.
11:08Magnetic fields are measured in milligauss.
11:10The fields recorded in most homes are of the order of a few milligauss at most.
11:14It has to do with the amount of electricity that's used.
11:16Yet as every school child knows, we live in a magnetic field, the Earth's magnetic field, which causes a compass needle to point north.
11:26And this field is hundreds of times larger. In America, it is about five hundred milligauss.
11:32The Earth's field, physicists argued, would totally dwarf those from power lines.
11:38There is absolutely no reasonable biological comparison between the Earth's magnetic field in which we evolved as human beings,
11:46and which some people think is responsible, at least partially, for the way our brains and central nervous systems developed.
11:52And the power frequency fields, which have only been with us, really, in a meaningful way for fifty-six, seventy years.
11:58The magnetic field given off by power lines alternates to and fro, sixty times a second, to the rhythm of the sixty hertz alternating power.
12:09When you're standing underneath the power line, every cell in your brain and body is entrained to the rhythm.
12:16Well, that rhythm is going sixty times a second.
12:19But physicists have calculated the force this oscillating magnetic field could exert on moving charges in the body,
12:26and the electric currents it could induce, and concluded they are tiny.
12:31Thousands of times less than the effects of the body's own heat bouncing molecules around.
12:38It's completely lost in the noise.
12:43The oscillation from the magnetic fields is absolutely minute compared to the general thermal oscillations.
12:52It would be a little like, let us say, that you have a windstorm, an erratic windstorm, where the wind's blowing all over the place,
13:01and somebody call, your neighbor calls up and said, your cat is breathing on my tree.
13:08Since he breathes in and out, that causes the tree to be pushed in and out, and that might damage the tree.
13:15Well, you wouldn't take it very seriously.
13:18Physicists found it even harder to see how such a tiny field might cause cancer.
13:23Cancer is usually caused when very energetic radiation or some chemical agent directly breaks or rearranges DNA.
13:32Adair calculated that power line fields were millions of times too small to do this.
13:38John Mulder is a radiation biologist, a specialist in how radiation can cure or cause cancer.
13:46Certain types of electromagnetic sources, the high-energy ones, X-rays, cosmic rays,
13:52are capable of actually breaking bonds in biological material and in cells.
13:57And it's that breaking of bonds, specifically breaking of bonds in the genetic material, that can cause cancer.
14:06This kind of radiation, ionizing radiation, lies at the high end of the electromagnetic spectrum,
14:13vibrating at very high frequencies, ten billion trillion times a second.
14:18Ionizing radiation like gamma rays from radioactive fallout, cosmic rays from space, and medical X-rays can all cause cancer.
14:28But at lower frequencies, the radiation no longer has the energy to break DNA.
14:34Within the optical frequencies, the photons have enough energy to excite electrons and molecules,
14:40and that's the basis of how flowers grow and of how we see.
14:44Once we get down a little bit lower, down to lower frequencies now into infrared,
14:50and then into the microwaves and radio frequencies,
14:53the photon energy isn't even enough to do that.
14:56But it can heat.
14:58And that's how a microwave oven works.
15:00It works by heating molecules.
15:02As the frequency gets a little lower, we now pass through the frequencies used for cellular phones.
15:08Then television and FM radio,
15:11and then even lower the ones used in broadcast AM radio.
15:15Somewhere around where AM radio is,
15:18the frequency is so low, the photon energy is so low,
15:23we don't even get heating.
15:2524 hours of every day,
15:27we are bathed in electromagnetic energy from all parts of the spectrum.
15:32Right at the low end, one million times less energetic than AM radio,
15:38are power line EMFs.
15:40The fields from these lines vibrate only 60 times a second.
15:45This frequency is so low, and the energy in the field so tiny,
15:49that all other natural sources dwarf it.
15:52Physicists have calculated a person standing under a power line at night
15:58would get some 10,000 times more electromagnetic energy from moonlight
16:03than from the power line.
16:05Such arguments led the 45,000 member American Physical Society
16:09to release a report last month saying that cancer fears were unfounded.
16:14Who says that the lower frequencies don't operate in another way to cause cancer?
16:19Who says that they all have to act in the same way?
16:22Who says they do?
16:23Ludicrous.
16:24I mean, what kind of mindset is that?
16:26Well, I fear it's the mindset of the American physicist.
16:29The fact that the physicists don't want to believe that should not in any event
16:39be the engine that drives public health policy in the face of all this epidemiology,
16:45which is the only valid tool we ever had to take preventive public health measures.
16:52It was through epidemiology that we learned that cigarette smoking was hazardous.
16:56Through epidemiology that we learned that asbestos inhalation was hazardous.
16:59Through epidemiology that we've learned that virtually every one
17:02of the environmental carcinogens that we know today
17:06and against which we've taken action has come to light through epidemiology.
17:09So the physicists are going to tell us, no, forget epidemiology, let's go into the lab.
17:13Give me a break.
17:14You know, when have they ever discovered anything about biology?
17:17Do you think they should stay out of this debate?
17:19No, I think everybody should get into the debate.
17:21The more the merrier.
17:22But I think it's ludicrous for physicists to try to pretend
17:25that they know about biology when they don't.
17:28And the example I gave that the last time they got involved
17:31in a major public health controversy, it was to assure the American people
17:34that no possible hazard comes from radioactive fallout,
17:37goes to show you how stupid and wrong they were about ionizing radiation.
17:42Traditionally, epidemiologists studied epidemics.
17:46Working back from an epidemic, usually an infectious disease, they tried to find a cause.
17:54Great successes of epidemiology include the major infectious diseases
17:59and modern plagues like AIDS.
18:04But increasingly, epidemiology has been used to link environmental toxins with disease,
18:10and this has proved more controversial.
18:13Here, where the effects are strong, most scientists concede that epidemiology alone
18:19is sufficient to prove a serious public health risk.
18:23In heavy smokers, for example, the risk of disease, the so-called risk ratio,
18:29is 10 to 20 times that of a non-smoker.
18:32Similarly, high risks were found in studies of asbestos workers.
18:37These findings were so striking that even before there was supporting laboratory evidence,
18:42many public health officials were convinced that such toxins endangered the public
18:47and advocated preventive health measures.
18:51So if magnetic fields pose similar risks, one might expect that electrical workers exposed
18:56to very high fields would get cancer at a significantly higher rate than average.
19:02EMF activists like Brodeur claim this is indeed the case.
19:08The clear preponderance of the occupational studies show that workers exposed
19:14to power frequency magnetic fields at home and at work are developing cancer
19:18at statistically significant higher rates than non-exposed people.
19:24But Brodeur's interpretation of the dozens of epidemiological studies
19:28isn't shared by many scientists.
19:32The first thing you ask is how strong are the correlations when you see them.
19:36So my favorite analogy is to cigarette smoking.
19:39Cigarette smokers have 10 to 20 times the incidence of lung cancer of non-smokers.
19:45That's a strong association.
19:47In the power frequency studies where we find associations, they've tended to be pretty weak.
19:53In the EMF studies that found an elevated risk of cancers, risk ratios of only 1.5 to 2 are typically seen.
20:00The second thing you would look for is, is it consistent?
20:04Does everybody find the same thing?
20:06All studies, for instance, of smokers showed elevated lung cancer.
20:11But with the power frequency occupational studies, you don't see that.
20:15Some studies show leukemia elevated, some studies don't.
20:19Some show brain elevated, some show that they're not.
20:24Three recent very large occupational studies produced quite inconsistent results.
20:29One found elevated levels of brain cancer, but no leukemia.
20:34A second found no brain cancer, but did find a suggestion of a link with leukemia.
20:40A third found nothing at all.
20:42Many epidemiologists think this inconsistency, combined with such low risk ratios,
20:47raises serious questions as to whether there is in fact a real risk,
20:51or whether all the studies are picking up his statistical noise.
20:56If it's a low level risk, you have to be very careful.
21:00Epidemiology is not sufficient in and of itself,
21:04unless you have a situation where you have an overwhelming disease response.
21:10And we have a few examples like that.
21:13The vinyl chloride monomer story, where a small number of workers
21:16developed a very rare malignancy, angiosarcoma of the liver,
21:20and were identified as having very high exposures to vinyl chloride monomer
21:25in the process of cleaning out some of the reactors.
21:28There we had a risk ratio which exceeded 200.
21:32There were also issues about whether all of the workers in these studies
21:36had really been exposed to magnetic fields.
21:39While serving on the Oak Ridge panel investigation into EMFs,
21:44Bill Bennett read dozens of epidemiological papers
21:47and found some were quite misleading.
21:50There was one report published that referred to an epidemic of male breast cancer
21:56among telephone linemen in New York State and the phone company.
22:01When you look at the data, you find that,
22:04although this predicted a relative risk of something like 6.5 to 1,
22:08there were only two cases that were reported, and they weren't linemen at all.
22:13They were actually office workers.
22:15So that somehow on the basis of these two cases,
22:18one is led to believe that there was a serious problem involved.
22:23And Bennett realized there were other occupational categories
22:27that epidemiologists seem to have virtually ignored.
22:30Going down to the Amtrak station,
22:33he measured a 50-milligauss magnetic field even with no trains,
22:38and he decided to do an experiment.
22:41I took data coming from Washington and New Haven at two-second intervals with a gauss nieder,
22:57and what I noticed in that result was that the magnetic fields were enormously high
23:04compared to most of the epidemiological studies.
23:07On his journey, he measured peak magnetic fields as high as 600 milligauss.
23:12There hasn't been a major epidemic of leukemia among electric railroad commuters, to my knowledge,
23:18or among workers on electric railroads who would be exposed to the fields even longer.
23:25Last year, one Norwegian study did investigate electric railway workers.
23:30It found no effect.
23:37But there are other problems that make interpreting the occupational epidemiology difficult.
23:42While workers in a substation are exposed to about 40 milligauss,
23:46the fields from home appliances can be quite large as well,
23:50especially six inches or less from the appliance.
23:54You can't be turned down for any reason.
23:57Time to be turned off toulus.
23:58It's time to be turned off toulus-ans.
23:59Time to be turned off toulus.
24:00While these appliances are
24:29only on intermittently and the fields fall off quickly with distance. Some, like
24:35electric blankets, can give long-term exposure. All of this makes the EMF issue
24:41far more complex than most epidemiology. As we live in an electric world with
24:46appliances and with overhead and underground cables, virtually everyone is
24:50exposed, at home, in the workplace, even in the park. Even the epidemiologists who
24:58believe there may be a link with disease, fear it may be impossible to prove.
25:03Cumulative exposure in the workplace is not notably higher than the cumulative
25:09exposure from outside the workplace. So if you have someone who's working, let's say,
25:13as an electrician, and look at how much exposure they accrue over their workday,
25:17if they go home and use an electric blanket or perhaps live near certain
25:21kinds of power lines, they may actually get an equivalent amount of exposure at
25:25home. So much for the claim of the electric utility industry that this is,
25:29quote, junk science. Paul Brodeur passionately disputes that the
25:34epidemiological studies are flawed and in a recent book argues that the truth is
25:39being concealed from the public. The cover-up involves government and industry,
25:45notably the Electric Power Research Institute, which funds much of the
25:49research. Mulder thinks this far-fetched. First of all, they would have to know
25:55the study was going to be negative before they funded it. And second, to repress
26:00positive findings in funded studies, I think, would be next to impossible.
26:04Because you'd have to repress it in this country, you'd have to repress it in other
26:08countries, you'd have to repress publications by industry, by government, by
26:14academics. I don't think you could do it.
26:18Are you saying they're lying? I didn't say they were lying. I never said they were
26:24lying. And I never, and I have never claimed, nor do I believe, that any one of
26:31these scientists or any, any scientists who's, who are being financed by EPRI or
26:37by the any, or by the utility industries are falsifying their scientific data. What
26:43they are doing, and let's be clear about this, is not lying. They are coming out and
26:49they're making public pronouncements about their opinions. It is my, quote, it is my
26:56opinion that there's absolutely no validity in any of the, uh, epidemiological studies
27:03that have been done so far. That's Patricia Buffler. Madame Buffler is not only a paid
27:09consultant of EPRI, she's a paid consultant of the San Diego Gas and Electric Company and
27:13has given an affidavit for them in court.
27:17I've worked with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reviewing their document on EMF, and
27:24I've worked with the Electric Power Institute putting in place their research program. Those
27:30are very important activities to participate in, and I think for someone to infer that by
27:36virtue of participating in those activities I have a conflict of interest is to attempt
27:41to intimidate me or others from participating in this public debate.
27:44Back in Omaha, Julie, Dee, and Atrian, dissatisfied with the health department's response, joined
27:53a national activists group, the EMR Alliance.
27:56They were babysat, and they were both diagnosed with cancer, and ten years prior to that there
28:01was a child with a...
28:02We do believe there is a cover-up and that they have known about the link with electromagnetic
28:06fields and cancer for quite some years.
28:10Certain individuals have the information and are able to protect themselves
28:14and their families.
28:15It is not fair that the rest of the public does not have it.
28:18They need to tell the truth.
28:21Last year, Julie got the chance to make her views known to President Clinton when ABC invited
28:26Kevin to the White House for a special children's town meeting.
28:30In preparation for the program, ABC filmed Kevin in Omaha.
28:34I just think it's a big cover-up.
28:38There's just too many kids getting cancer around here.
28:41There's 11 kids in this one-mile radius from the substation that has cancer, 11 of them.
28:50The night before he was to appear with President Clinton, he became ill out in Washington and
28:55had to be hospitalized.
28:57So my other son took over for him on the show.
29:00Patrick, do you want to talk to the President?
29:03I want to ask you his question.
29:06I have heard that recent studies have linked EMFs to childhood cancers.
29:12Other countries such as Sweden are passing laws to set standards as our President.
29:19Can you help lower EMFs so hopefully some childhood cancers can be prevented?
29:24That's something that we can do something about.
29:29We had a study in 1990 which was inconclusive about it.
29:33But you're right, Sweden has concluded that EMFs do lead to higher rates of cancer.
29:39So I have asked the person who runs the Environmental Protection Agency for our government to do a review
29:45of this and to make a report to me in the near future.
29:49We just have to look into it and see whether we think there's honestly evidence there.
29:53And if there is, then we have to take action and we're looking into it.
29:57And you tell your brother to hang in there.
29:59Kevin, I hope you're watching us and we're praying for you and pulling for you.
30:04Five days later, Kevin, Patrick and Julie were invited to the Oval Office to talk further
30:09with President Clinton.
30:10In my heart, I believe President Clinton is sympathetic to the children.
30:15After meeting with him, I believe he's sympathetic.
30:18But I believe because of politics and large industries, his hands are tied.
30:24Two years before Julie's meeting at the White House, Congress had set aside funds,
30:33some 65 million dollars for research to try and resolve the issue.
30:41Because of the inconclusive epidemiology, research scientists like Gary Borman were brought in
30:46to investigate EMFs in the laboratory.
30:49Perhaps with carefully controlled scientific experiments, biologists would be able to unlock
30:54the mystery of magnetic fields.
30:57Borman realized that to get definitive answers, he had to attract first-class scientists.
31:02You have to apply the same scientific standards to magnetic field research as you would any
31:08other field.
31:10We're trying to get the best investigators we can to bring their resources and their intellect
31:14to bear on this problem.
31:16It's very difficult.
31:17A lot of scientists would rather work on AIDS, breast cancer, or other areas.
31:22And they're reluctant to get involved in this field.
31:25We're trying to get the best scientists involved, and we're having some luck in that regard.
31:30One large grant went to the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
31:38They built the largest rodent electromagnetic exposure facility in the world, capable of exposing
31:433,000 animals at a time.
31:50Our budget for this program is a little over $9 million.
31:55The facility is constructed almost entirely of non-metallic materials.
31:59All the wall and ceiling construction is wood.
32:03Temperature, humidity, noise level, light level are all controlled and monitored continuously.
32:10The Earth's magnetic fields in all the rooms have been mapped very extensively.
32:14We monitor the ambient fields in the rooms continuously.
32:18So I think it's fair to say we've taken quite great pains to remove any potential confounders
32:22from the program.
32:23Two years ago, the center began a series of crucial studies to see if magnetic fields
32:29caused birth defects or reproductive problems, to see if they caused or promoted cancer,
32:35to discover if magnetic fields affected the immune system.
32:39Unlike humans who are constantly exposed to 60 hertz magnetic fields, McCormick could ensure
32:47that one group of rodents, the control group, would be completely unexposed.
32:51Other groups would be exposed to different amounts of magnetic field from 20 milligauss all
32:57the way up to a massive 10,000 milligauss, thousands of times the average exposure in most homes.
33:03If anything could detect an effect, at least in rodents, these experiments should.
33:11Another exciting possibility that interested Borman was that the magnetic fields were subtly
33:16affecting cancer genes in totally novel ways, as Paul Brodeur had claimed.
33:22While powerline magnetic fields could not break DNA, some unconfirmed studies had claimed
33:27that the fields might stimulate a certain cancer gene, increasing its activity and, presumably,
33:33its likelihood of causing cancer.
33:38Jeff Saffer, a young molecular biologist, was intrigued by this possibility.
33:43So a couple of years ago, he set out to try and validate the experiments.
33:47He placed identical batches of human cells into two test chambers.
33:52One batch of cells would be exposed to powerline magnetic fields.
33:56The other would not.
33:57Jeff Saffer's job was to measure precisely whether this field affected the activity of
34:02a cancer gene called the MYC gene.
34:05If it did, it meant, in principle, there might be a mechanism by which EMFs could cause cancer.
34:14Saffer knew that he had to be extremely careful.
34:16Temperature, humidity, noise and vibrations might affect the subtle changes he was looking for.
34:22Same on this experiment.
34:25Yeah, there's more variation.
34:27His first effort failed.
34:28Undaunted, he continued systematically searching for something he might have done wrong.
34:33I think we might want to...
34:35These efforts would take nearly two years.
34:37To get good connotation, especially the TPA.
34:41By spring 1995, results from the different labs were beginning to come in.
34:48The Electromagnetic Rodent Exposure Laboratory in Chicago had completed five studies.
34:54First, the study looking at whether powerline magnetic fields caused fetal abnormalities.
35:00We evaluated a total of 3,000 animals.
35:04We did complete skeletal evaluations, evaluations of the head, evaluations of all the visceral
35:09organs.
35:10And that study was completely negative.
35:12We found no adverse effects of the magnetic fields at all.
35:14A reproductive study involving 12 litters from three generations of animals bred under
35:20the magnetic fields was also over.
35:22The endpoints we looked at were number of successful pregnancies, number of litters which were actually
35:30delivered, number of pups per litter, birth weight, and a number of other parameters to
35:34assess the health of the pups once they're delivered.
35:37And again, the results of that study demonstrated no effect on the magnetic fields on reproductive
35:40performance in either sex.
35:43Two cancer studies using specially bred cancer-prone mice were also finished.
35:49Did the magnetic fields promote an already existing cancer?
35:52Did the exposed animals get higher cancer rates?
35:55Again, we found no evidence that magnetic fields stimulated lymphoma production in either
36:01strain.
36:02The EMF exposure had no effect.
36:05Finally, the immunology study also came out negative.
36:10One big study is still going on where rats will spend two years, essentially their whole
36:14life, under the magnetic field.
36:17This will test for a longer-term chronic effect.
36:20The results will be known next year.
36:25Meanwhile at the Pacific Northwest Laboratories in Washington State, Jeff Saffer had gone to
36:30great lengths to discover whether magnetic fields could directly influence the MYC cancer
36:35gene.
36:39Despite his best efforts, nothing had worked.
36:43But he refused to give up.
36:45We went back and used different types of plastic ware to grow the cells that were different
36:50geometries, different shapes.
36:55We tried some higher field intensities.
36:58We tried some lower field intensities.
37:02We tried different types of serum.
37:05We also tried different concentrations and, again, could not find any conditions under which
37:11the cells were responsive to magnetic fields.
37:13Finally, Saffer took an extraordinary step.
37:17He actually went to the laboratory of the investigator whose work he was trying to replicate.
37:22We went to the laboratories in New York City that had done these experiments, used their
37:28cells, used their culture vessel, their exposure system, and again were unable to find evidence
37:35for a change in MYC expression due to the magnetic field.
37:40Saffer's conclusion was that the effects reported were not real, but probably resulted from inadequate
37:46experimental controls.
37:49Last month, in the scientific journal Nature, a preliminary report of Saffer's work appeared.
37:55The same issue carried a report from a team in Cambridge, England, who had also tried and
38:00failed to find any effect.
38:04Other studies have recently reported negative results, a study into whether EMFs affect melatonin
38:09levels in humans, a hormone that's been linked to breast cancer, found no effect.
38:14A large study of pregnant women using electric blankets was also negative.
38:19While other experiments are still underway, so far things don't look promising.
38:24As you refine your studies, if there really is an effect, the effect should increase, it
38:28should become stronger, it should become more focused.
38:32And if you cannot, with repeated studies and with better studies, you continue not to find
38:37an effect or find only marginal effects, then it becomes obvious that there's really nothing
38:41there.
38:42When completed, these studies will help Congress decide what, if any, action to take.
38:50But Paul Brodeur doesn't believe laboratory studies should drive health policy.
38:54Laboratory studies are not going to be the criteria upon which we base preventive public health
39:00measures.
39:01We have used the epidemiology as the only viable tool for implementing preventive public health
39:08measures.
39:10It is the only viable tool.
39:11And then also information came in from that one.
39:15But in the face of so much negative laboratory data, can epidemiology alone prove that cancers
39:21like the one Kevin Larm has are caused by EMFs.
39:26One thing most epidemiologists agree on, even the ones who support a link between EMFs and
39:31cancer, is that the kind of lay epidemiology that the Omaha parents have done is unsound.
39:38They had identified four zip codes in Omaha which appear to have two to three times more
39:43cancer than average.
39:45And these zip codes are crisscrossed with power lines.
39:49It looks impressive but for two things.
39:51First, according to their map, only three of the cases actually live within 300 feet of
39:56a power line.
39:58And power line fields fall off to tiny levels within this distance.
40:03But there is a second more crucial weakness to this lay epidemiology.
40:09Cancers do not fall evenly across the landscape.
40:12Even if there is no carcinogenic agent in the environment, just by random chance, some zip
40:18codes will get more cases than average.
40:23Others will get less.
40:25For example, this densely populated zip code a few miles away has just five cancer cases,
40:32less than half the expected number.
40:34And it too is crisscrossed with power lines.
40:38In many of the cluster investigations where cases are taking place in time and space, these
40:43events most likely are happening by chance.
40:46And if you draw artificial boundaries around a cluster in time and place, it's like the
40:52Texas sharpshooter.
40:54Epidemiologists like to tell their students the cautionary tale of the Texas sharpshooter.
41:00He takes his gun, shoots at the side of the barn, and then draws a bullseye around it afterwards.
41:10And then says, aha, I have a bullseye.
41:13Drawing artificial boundaries in space and time, such as cancers occurring in certain zip
41:18codes during certain time periods, can create an illusion of a cluster.
41:23In fact, like the sharpshooter's bullets, cancers are usually scattered randomly throughout
41:27the landscape.
41:29Even scientists who support an EMF cancer link agree it's not valid scientifically.
41:36By statistics alone, it's very possible that there will be a number of cancers in one block
41:41and none in the next ten blocks.
41:45And if one wants to try to identify sources of cancer, what one must do is study many,
41:51many children.
41:53That's just what a number of investigators did.
41:57Over the past 15 years, a series of residential studies, each involving thousands of children,
42:02have been done.
42:04The results have been controversial because, depending on how exposure from power line
42:09EMFs was estimated, epidemiologists either found or did not find associations with childhood
42:15cancer.
42:17Like the occupational studies of electrical workers, the typical risk ratios reported
42:21in these studies were low, around two or less.
42:25Too low, most epidemiologists felt, to prove an effect.
42:30But in 1992, a landmark study appeared from Sweden.
42:35A huge investigation, it enrolled everyone living within 300 meters of Sweden's high-voltage
42:41transmission line system over a 25-year period.
42:45They went far beyond all previous studies in their efforts to measure magnetic fields, calculating
42:50the fields that the children were exposed to at the time of their cancer diagnosis and before.
42:57This study reported an apparently clear association between magnetic field exposure and childhood
43:02leukemia, with a risk ratio for the most highly exposed of nearly four.
43:07The Swedish government announced it was investigating new policy options, including whether to move
43:12children away from schools near power lines.
43:16Surely here was the proof that power lines were dangerous.
43:20The proof that even the physicists and biological naysayers would have to accept.
43:29But three years after the study was published, the Swedish research no longer looked so unassailable.
43:37This is a copy of the original contractor's report, which reveals the remarkable thoroughness
43:42of the Swedish team.
43:44Unlike the published article, which just summarizes part of the data, the report shows everything
43:50they did in great detail, all the things they measured and all the comparisons they made.
43:55Children in relation to calculated magnetic fields closest in time to diagnosis, cutoff points
44:00at 0.1 and 0.2 microtesla.
44:02Children in relation to calculated magnetic fields one year before diagnosis.
44:04Magnetic fields five years before diagnosis.
44:06When scientists saw how many things they had measured, nearly 800 risk ratios are in the report.
44:15They began accusing the Swedes of falling into one of the most fundamental errors in epidemiology,
44:26sometimes called the multiple comparisons fallacy.
44:31The problem is, when you do as they did, hundreds and hundreds of comparisons, something
44:37enabled 800 different comparisons.
44:40By the standard way we do statistics, we would expect 5% of those to be statistically elevated
44:47and 5% to be statistically decreased.
44:51And now you have a problem.
44:53If you find by one measure of exposure that leukemia is up in a group of kids, is that real?
45:01Or is that the result of just random noise in the system?
45:05In their thoroughness, the Swedes had created their own version of the Texas sharpshooter
45:10problem.
45:11Even if nothing is going on due to power lines, if you measure hundreds of risk ratios they
45:16will scatter by random chance around a mean of 1.
45:21Some will be above and some below.
45:24Risk ratios below 1 suggest that EMFs protect against cancer.
45:29Above 1, that they increase the cancer rate.
45:32But the published article focused only on the strongest positive risk ratios.
45:37The summary highlights a nearly four-fold increase in risk of childhood leukemia.
45:44This is what the press picks up and the public hears.
45:48It is not scientifically reasonable to do all the measurements, but then only pick out the
45:53ones that give you the answer you want for publication.
45:58If I dredged through their original report, I can find situations which looked at in isolation
46:05without looking at the rest of the report.
46:09That if that was the only data I gave you, I could claim that that proved that power lines
46:13protected children against childhood leukemia.
46:18It is analogous to the Texas sharpshooter.
46:22What we're searching for in any research is truth.
46:25That search for truth argues for being rigorous, having clearly documented your methods and not
46:33withholding any information, not using the information in a selective way.
46:39How many of the EMF studies commit this error is unclear.
46:43Original contractors' reports are rarely available, yet the issue is fundamental.
46:48Outside of epidemiology, most scientists are unanimous.
46:52You cannot confuse a study that tests a hypothesis with one that generates them.
46:57The epidemiologists should decide what they are going to look for and write it down before
47:04they make the search.
47:05Just what they are going to look for and just how they are going to look for it.
47:09Then after they make their analysis, they will find two sets of things.
47:14They will find answers to the questions they had asked.
47:19And now we have a situation where one can analyze properly the statistical significance of those
47:27answers.
47:27They will also have answers to questions which weren't asked.
47:32Odd things may show up.
47:34And that's very interesting too.
47:36But we separate those in another category.
47:39We call those hypothesis-generating experiments.
47:43And if you want to say whether that's really a real result or just a fluctuation, then you
47:49must do a second experiment where that is on your list of things to look at.
47:55Yeah, this may be a weakness in the album study.
48:00I'm not familiar with it myself.
48:03And there are weaknesses to be found in all of the epidemiological studies.
48:06You can take any given epidemiological study-and I saw the asbestos industry do this time
48:12and again-as it comes over the horizon, gets published, you can shoot it down with all kinds
48:17of stuff they're trying to shoot down the Canadian study now.
48:22But the totality of these studies suggests a pervasive major public health problem that
48:32needs to be dealt with and that I believe will have to be dealt with because the American
48:37people will demand that it be dealt with.
48:40In the face of negative biology and contentious epidemiology, what should lawmakers do to protect
48:47people from a risk that may well not be there?
48:51Peter Wahlberg is an expert in risk assessment.
48:54One thing, he says, is certain.
48:56Even supposing there is a risk, the fact that it has been so hard to prove that power line
49:01magnetic fields cause cancer means that by definition any risk cannot be very large.
49:08Even assuming the Swedish study were true, the increased risk to children of getting
49:12a very rare cancer like leukemia is of the order of one in a million.
49:16Would moving them to another school make them safer?
49:20On the one hand, you might argue that if you believe there is an elevated risk from the
49:24adjacent nature of the power lines that you could move the children out.
49:28But if this in fact involves putting them on a vehicle such as a bus and driving them
49:32a mile or so, we know from real actuarial statistics that being on a bus does carry some real health
49:40hazards in terms of injury and death.
49:43The EMF risk is likely very small.
49:46It's hypothetical on several bases, whereas the risk from getting in a car is very concrete.
49:52It's very real.
49:53We can actually appreciate that and we know how to calculate that.
49:56And to say that you're going to incur these concrete risks in order to avoid this very
50:01low hypothetical risk doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
50:05And in fact, the Swedish authorities now agree.
50:08On reflection, they decided not to make any policy changes based on the 1992 study.
50:14So should President Clinton follow the Swedes and do nothing?
50:18Not according to David Carpenter.
50:20There's too much smoke here.
50:22There's got to be a fire.
50:24While I admit that the proof is not 100%, there is consistency in correlation between leukemia
50:33and brain tumors and exposure to magnetic fields, both in residential and occupational settings.
50:38So I do not believe that doing nothing is appropriate.
50:43Amidst the public controversy for Dee and Julie, there is good personal news.
50:48In a happy reversal of fortune, both Kevin and Jonathan's cancers are in remission and their
50:53future looks very promising.
50:55Thanks to major advances in childhood cancer therapy, nearly two-thirds of childhood cancers
51:00are now curable.
51:02But they have not changed their beliefs about EMFs.
51:06Our human body is very complex.
51:08It will be years before scientists understand it more and they will never understand it completely
51:15the way that God put us together.
51:17There is significant studies that do show that electromagnetic fields make changes and that's
51:23what I believe in.
51:25And do they have any doubts they're on the right track?
51:27No.
51:28None at all.
51:31I'm 100% sure.
51:33Rightly or wrongly, power lines are now part of a long list of environmental agents that the
51:41public fears.
51:43While unproven, these fears, once established, are hard to erase.
51:48Reducing anxieties is far, far more difficult than inciting anxieties.
51:53I think it partly hinges on a difficulty that people have with understanding numbers.
51:59I mean, you can say the risk is high, the risk is low and so forth, but the quantitative differences are difficult for people to appreciate.
52:06But why would people fear power lines more than established risks such as smoking and driving?
52:11What are the big risks that people seem to be totally unafraid of, like driving a car, versus the small risks they appear to be very afraid of?
52:22The differences seem to be people are less afraid of risks they think they control.
52:30And they're less afraid of risks that they think they understand.
52:34So the things that people are most afraid of is things they can't control and don't understand.
52:40And certainly power lines fall right in that category.
52:44A society must pay a price for its fears, whether they are real or imaginary.
52:49The power line controversy is costing an estimated $1 billion a year, money, critics argue, that could be much better spent elsewhere.
52:58The total cost to our society was this nonsense, this unreasoning fear of electromagnetic fields.
53:05It's a serious drag on our economy and in some sense on our civilization.
53:11And it's like the little boy who calls wolf all the time.
53:15And one of these days a real wolf is going to come and people are going to be so used to the imaginary wolves that they're going to miss the real wolf.
53:24Frontline wants to hear your reactions to our programs.
53:33So interact with Frontline by sending your comments by fax to 617-254-0243, by letter or home video to Dear Frontline, 125 Western Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts, 02134.
53:51And next time on Frontline, 12 years ago, Los Angeles was gripped by another gruesome murder case.
54:05And the hillside strangler almost got away with it.
54:12In Frontline's The Mind of a Murderer find out how the killer's elaborate disguise was unmasked.
54:19Let us say that you have a erratic windstorm where the wind's blowing all over the place.
54:31Your neighbor calls up and said, your cat is breathing on my tree and that might damage the tree.
54:37Well, you wouldn't take it very seriously.
54:44I don't know.
54:45I don't know.
54:46I don't know.
54:47I don't know.
54:48I don't know.
54:49I don't know.
54:50I don't know.
54:51I don't know.
54:52I don't know.
54:53I don't know.
54:54I don't know.
54:55I don't know.
54:56I don't know.
54:57I don't know.
54:58I don't know.
54:59I don't know.
55:00I don't know.
55:01I don't know.
55:02I don't know.
55:03I don't know.
55:04I don't know.
55:05I don't know.
55:06I don't know.
55:07I don't know.
55:08I don't know.
55:09I don't know.
55:10I don't know.
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