Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 15, 1993 TAG: 9303150065
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
STUDY REJECTS ELECTRICITY AS CARCINOGEN
In what they term the most comprehensive U.S. study to date, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Southern California Edison report today that they have found no link between increased cancer rates and exposure to electric fields among the company's employees.Several previous studies in the United States and Europe have shown that exposure to electric and magnetic fields, commonly known as EMFs, increase the risk of certain types of cancer, such as leukemia, lymphoma and brain cancer, particularly among children. But those studies have been highly controversial and researchers are constantly looking for better evidence on both sides of the argument.
The UCLA-SCE team examined health records for 36,221 employees who worked for SCE for at least a year from 1960 to 1988 and correlated them with the employee's on-the-job exposure to EMFs.
They report in the journal Epidemiology that an excessive number of cancers was not observed in any group, no matter how high the exposure to EMF.
"The method we were able to use was better than that in previous studies - not because we were a better research team, but because we had access to information that others did not," said epidemiologist Jack D. Sahl, a senior research scientist at Edison."This gives me more confidence that there isn't a large problem with EMF, and it provides support for the idea that there is no problem with EMF in the workplace."
The new results come from "a well-designed and well-conducted study . . . that certainly weighs in on the negative side, but it doesn't negate the evidence that precedes it," said epidemiologist David Savitz of the University of North Carolina. "It isn't the final word on the issue, but it is an important study in the sense that it is more sophisticated . . . than previous studies.
But the results will be suspect among many researchers because the authors work for an electric utility, said physicist Louis Slesin, editor of Microwave News, who has followed the EMF issue closely.
The results also are suspect because the population studied is not large enough to detect subtle risks, Slesin and others argued.
- Los Angeles Times