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New York's High-Wire Act

A GIS-based study identifies populations living near high-voltage power lines in an attempt to determine cancer risk.

In 1979, epidemiologist Nancy Wertheimer and electrical engineer Ed Leeper were first to raise concerns over possible links between electromagnetic fields (EMF) emitted from residential wiring and childhood leukemia and other cancers. Their study, "Electrical Wiring Configuration and Childhood Cancer" -- published in the American Journal of Epidemiology -- set off continuing investigations both in the United States and abroad, but to date there has been little consensus in the findings.


"It's not surprising that results haven't been consistent," said Daniel Wartenberg, associate professor of epidemiology at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute of New Jersey. "If you look back at smoking, solid studies were published on the subject around 1950, yet it wasn't until the mid-60s that the Surgeon General felt there were sufficient data to make a statement on health risks associated with cigarette smoking. By that time, there were probably hundreds of papers on the topic. There are a lot of things we know that have certain health effects, yet we don't understand how they work. We're only beginning to unravel the mysteries of how aspirin works."

Some studies associate high-level magnetic fields with an increase in cancer. A summary of Scandinavian studies by Anders Ahlbom in 1993, for example, shows an association between leukemia and high-voltage power lines.

In the 1996 report by the National Academy of Sciences, a meta-analysis concluded that, on average, there is an association between childhood leukemia and wire codes (a system developed by Ed Leeper that ranks the size of electrical wire -- an approximate measure of current carrying capacity -- and their distance from one's home.) However, the report does not state that these were causative sources.

Conversely, results from a National Cancer Institute study, released in July of this year, "found no significant excess risk of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia [ALL] associated with time-weighted average summary residential magnetic-field levels of .02