In 1979, doctors at the University of Colorado reported that children exposed to higher than average magnetic fields had a twofold to threefold increased risk of leukaemia. Five subsequent epidemiological studies have reported similar findings, the latest in 1992 by the Swedish Karolinska Institute which studied a population of nearly half a million people living within 300 metres of power lines between 1960 and 1985; whereas a 1992 British government study and one by the Oak Ridge Associated Universities, USA, have concluded that the evidence to link low-level electric and magnetic fields with childhood cancers is too weak and inconsistent. In the USA, death rates as a result of breast cancer were reported in 1994 as 38 percent higher in women exposed to EMFs through job-related activities.
2. In the USA, there has been a more than 300-fold increase in the per capita residential use of electricity since the turn of the century (20-fold since 1940). If rapidly increasing widespread exposure to low-level electromagnetic fields were strongly associated with childhood cancers, there should be an observable epidemic. However, there is little, if any, evidence of such.
3. Even if people were subjected to oscillating electromagnetic fields enormously greater than those from power lines, these fields would still generate fields in the human body far smaller than those naturally produced by the random motion of electrons and ions in the body's cells. It seems foolish to be worrying about their conceivable effects of these minuscule magnetic fields compared with the bigger fields in which humans are immersed all the time.