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“There is a suspected correlation to 60 Hz electric fields from power lines and leukemia in children,” Dr Robert Ashley, a retired electrical engineering professor told a meeting of the IEEE on Monday, October 16, 2000 in Overland Park, KS.

Ashley, a former professor at the University of Kansas at Lawrence and University of Colorado at Denver, now retired, has spent most of the last 10 years investigating the power line and cancer connection. He addressed a lunchtime audience of the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineering (IEEE) at the Wyndham Garden Hotel in Overland Park.

The first epidemiological study to show a weak but positive link between overhead high voltage power lines and heath risks was reported by Wertheimer and Leeper in 1979, Ashley said.

Reviewing data taken in the Denver area, they found a three times higher rate of cancer death for children living near power lines compared to living in random locations. From this analysis, they concluded a possible link between magnetic fields and health risks.

Since then, though hundreds of similar studies have been conducted, searching for a link between magnetic fields from power lines and increased health risks, only one other study, conducted in Sweden, has shown any other positive correlation. Ashley thinks he knows why.

“Every study conducted, has tried to correlate health risks to the magnetic fields from the power lines. There is no correlation to any magnetic field effect, because it’s the electric field!” Ashley said.

In the Denver study, the power lines happened to be ones carrying very high voltage. The correlation might have been stronger if the cancer rate was compared to the electric field strengths, Ashley concluded.

“She [Wertheimer] did not have funding to do actual measurements of the magnetic and electric fields- that was the flaw.”

Why did only the Swedish study show a positive correlation, Ashley posed? In Sweden, all the power lines have the same configuration and run at 400 kV and 1230 kV, compared with lower voltages in the US. The Swedish study compared the leukemia rate with distance to the power line.

Beyond 150 meters from the power lines, the Swedish study concluded there was no impact on health. Living within 50 meters, there was a three times higher risk for childhood leukemia.

“The Swedish epidemiological report turned me around,” Ashley said. “The field strengths that might be under the power lines in the Swedish study were 3 kV/m, higher than typically found in the US.”

What the nature of the biological influence might be is not certain. Dr. John Frank, a retired Biophysicist who specializes in electromagnetic effects and biology said, “The theory is fuzzy enough on the biological end that the only way to approach this problem is to work in the epidemiological end.”

Ashley agrees, and the missing element to all the epidemiological studies is accurate measurements of the electric fields. “There is a lot of meaningless measurements being done by the epidemiologists,” Ashley said.  “There is room for a lot of research, but right now most of it is out in left field and is wrong.”

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