
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, May 14, 1995                   TAG: 9505150099
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CANCER, ELECTRICITY NOT LINKED

The world's largest group of physicists, the American Physical Society, has taken a stance on a contentious public health issue by saying it can find no evidence that the electromagnetic fields that radiate from power lines cause cancer.

The group's statement, issued recently after years of quiet deliberation, appears to be the strongest such statement by a scientific society in the 15 years or so that the issue has been debated.

The society said that groundless public fears about a possible link between power lines and cancer were diverting billions of dollars into mitigation work.

``More serious environmental problems are neglected for lack of funding and public attention,'' it said. ``The burden of cost placed on the American public is incommensurate with the risk, if any.''

Dr. Robert Park, a physicist at the University of Maryland and a society spokesman, said the group believed the time had come to take a position because ``public concern was growing even as the epidemiologic evidence was shrinking and becoming fainter.''

Many physicists are skeptical of a link between power lines and cancer because the fields are so weak. Both electric and magnetic fields are produced whenever electricity flows through a wire, but fears center on magnetic fields because only they penetrate the human body.

The earth's magnetic field, to which human beings are constantly exposed, is often hundreds of times larger than the man-made ones people worry about. Magnetic fields that have been linked to childhood leukemia in some studies are about one 100th the strength of the earth's field.

Citizen activists and local governments have forced electric utilities to move power lines, to install shielding and to cancel electrical plant upgrades.

by CNB