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On TV about HV power lines and health

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Tesladownunder

Mon Sept 28 2009, 04:58AM

Registered Member #10 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 09:45AM
Location: Bunbury, Australia
Posts: 1424

This was shot two weeks ago by WIN TV and aired nationally in Australia. I was an independent expert in HV with medical specialist qualification. The video is here and on my site here.
A rather long interview was cut down a lot. Nevertheless I did get to run my briefcase TC and my big TC and Faraday cage.
The issue of HV lines is basically that early studies suggested a risk of childhood leukemia if you lived near a power line. Later large studies in the US and UK which actually measured ELF magnetic fields and looked at all leukemia patients with controls showed no difference in mag field exposure. There have been over 100 studies which in my reading have excluded health risk to any reasonable doubt.

1254113864 10 FT0 Mediaacajohnmortincage

quicksilver

Mon Sept 28 2009, 09:19PM

Registered Member #1408 Joined: Fri Mar 21 2008, 03:49PM
Location: Oracle, AZ
Posts: 679

When my wife was pregnant with my son I spoke with the doctor about this issue and his opinion was that the controls were not there (and this was back 20 yrs ago) to be appropriate. He told me an interesting story that two small towns in the Midwest had a high level of children with this cancer and the only thing in common was the power lines.
It was a terrible tragedy but answers were just not forthcoming so the power lines became a scapegoat.

Mates

Sun Oct 04 2009, 05:03PM

Registered Member #1025 Joined: Sun Sept 23 2007, 07:53PM
Location: Czech Rep.
Posts: 566

I have few funny things to add to this topicâ€¦

First of all, in all ex-communist countries I know the HV power lines are always kept out of the urban areas. This could have other than health reasons, but I have to say that I was pretty surprised when I started to travel abroad (the â€œwesternâ€ countries) and I saw the power lines going directly above houses. My first reaction was â€“ that canâ€™t be healthy!

The second thing might sound more like a sci-fi, but it is my personal experience and also an experience of some of my friends. Here is the story: A long time ago when I was much younger (age 17-18) I was experimenting with hallucinogenic mushrooms which are quite common in the area where I live. We used to trip a lot and very soon we found out that once you pass below the HV power lines being on the drug (even if you did not see them) you experience something very unusual. I mean something really strongly affects your trippy-mind and as a result you loose the feeling about the direction you came from and sometimes you get completely lost in time and space which can last for long minutes. We even liked this effect so much that some of our trips started by passing below the power lines. So my conclusion â€“ there must be some kind of field which interferes with live matter. But whether it can cause cancer? I doubt about it... But anyway, I would never buy a house which is standing right below power lines.

Cheers Mates

Tesladownunder

Mon Oct 05 2009, 01:04AM

Registered Member #10 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 09:45AM
Location: Bunbury, Australia
Posts: 1424

A drug induced anecdote does not meet any criteria for a scientific observation.
There are over 100 trials and many lines of evidence that do not support there being a danger from low level 50Hz magnetic fields. Some of these are huge trials that looked at all childhood leukemia patients in the UK over a certain period and measured magnetic fields. There has been no increase in leukemia despite 20 times increase in power use over decades. Animals studies are negative. eg mice brought up over generations in 1 Tesla Extra low freq felds (thousands of times higher than the powere line ELF which is only a small fraction when compared to the earths field).
There are many poor quality observational studies using surrogate markers like the original one which used wiring codes that have a lot of criticisms but much of the publicity. Publish 10 good negative trials and one poor positive one and guess which one the tabloids will pick up on.
People have an irrational fear of power lines hence property values are lower, hence socioeconomic class is lower under power lines. Poverty is associated with cancer risk of many types.
I could go on....

GeordieBoy

Mon Oct 05 2009, 12:24PM

Registered Member #1232 Joined: Wed Jan 16 2008, 10:53PM
Location: Doon tha Toon!
Posts: 881

Just thought i'd mention that the alternative option to running wires over your house is running a cable under it. But the cost of burying a high-voltage high-current armoured cable is obviously much higher than putting a few pylons up.

In this case they are probably closer to you, but the leakage magnetic field should be smaller because the phase conductors are bunched closer together in an underground cable.

For some reason I always thought that the perceived risk to humans from overhead power lines had something to do with the E-field altering the air, rather than the effect of the magnetic field on humans. Doesn't the E-field cause splitting of the air into more reactive ions? I also heard something about the E-field concentrating airbourne pollutants, presumably like how electrostatic precipitators work? Although you would think the cables would actually grab the pollutants out of the air and keep them firmly bound to the conductors instead of them finding the ways into our lungs!

-Richie,

Mates

Mon Oct 05 2009, 01:09PM

Registered Member #1025 Joined: Sun Sept 23 2007, 07:53PM
Location: Czech Rep.
Posts: 566

Hi TDU,
Golden words about selling the shocking news much easier than the realistic onesâ€¦

Just to make the discussion more interesting I will still oppose you a bit, despite I basically agree with you. First of all, Iâ€™m a scientist. Iâ€™ve just finished my Ph.D. in a field of genomic instability and cancer and my field is studying the response of human cells to very low doses of replication stress and genotoxic agents. Iâ€™m mentioning this just to make my arguments a bit more credible (in other words Iâ€™m not some crazy junkie as it might look from my previous post).

You argue with mouse models. This is very demagogic, because mouse has very different life span than humans. Also mouse has different life strategy, where major investments are dedicated to large number â€“ low quality â€“ siblings. Thatâ€™s something very far away from humans. As an example, there are known tumor-supressor genes and/or oncogenes having no significant impact on mouse susceptibility to cancer. It means that based on mouse models these genes are cancer unrelated but this not true in humans. Negative prove on mouse says nothing!

My second argument is about the experimental conditions. I suppose the experimental models were not exposed to real power-lines but to an experimental device mimicking only some of the aspects of the power lines. I doubt that such devices were dealing with megawatts for prolonged time period and as such it canâ€™t be tolerated as absolute prove. BTW: You must know by yourself how even simple devices start to behave like crazy (even in our linear electricity world) once you start playing with HV and high power.

Third argument is very speculative, but Iâ€™m only trying to see things from wider perspective. My idea is based on a simple fact that we cannot measure and calculate everything. In other words, there are things in our space which we do not understand properly and maybe never will (once you try a trip you will know what I mean). Letâ€™s imagine the horrifying fact that through a metal cable which has few cm in diameter you are powering a whole city. It means a huge flow of energy in a very compact environment. Theoretically, we can envisage such flow of electrons to a flow of water molecules and as we all know any prediction about the water behavior is impossible once you reach certain speed (because of turbulences). So we are dealing with something which is very unnatural and we have only time-limited experience with such thing. I can remind as example the extinction of old roman society which was very likely caused by lead tubing they used for water pipes.

So, taken together:
I would never ever in my life recommend to anyone to buy a house below power lines and I would always suggest keeping these things away from urban areas. In case you decided to be the one fighting for the opposite, please buy a house under power lines as the first thing â€“ that would make you much more credible than the mouse arguments. Or, as something you can begin with, pick up a tent and go to sleep one night below 250KV power-lines. You can give us report how well you slept.

Cheers Mates

DrZoidberg

Mon Oct 05 2009, 10:08PM

Registered Member #350 Joined: Mon Mar 27 2006, 05:14PM
Location:
Posts: 106

I believe that powerlines probably don't affect cancer risk. However it might have an effect on the brain. The voltage that those magnetic fields induce in our brains is theoretically way too small to cause a neuron to fire. But if a neuron is already close to the point of firing a little extra voltage might have an effect.
There are many people who claim to be sensitive to em fields and get headaches. Now they might just imagine it but I'm not sure about it.

Mates

Sun Jan 03 2010, 09:07PM

Registered Member #1025 Joined: Sun Sept 23 2007, 07:53PM
Location: Czech Rep.
Posts: 566

Hi TDU and guys,
Recently I run into a study published in PNAS (Burda et al. PNAS, 2009) which is closely related to this topic. Abstract of the study is below and the PDF file is enclosed. It is also certain kind of satisfaction for me, because apparently my personal experience with psilocybin-based sensitization to magnetic field of HV power lines seems to have real base.

There were already too many revolutions in the history of science so I'm always a bit skeptical about the resolute conclusions such as "scientifically proven safety of HV power lines". No matter how big authority stands behind. So my opinion persists â€“ living beneath HV power lines is a risky business because as shows the reported study at least some mammals are strongly affected by their proximity. Actually it seems as a nice topic for further experiments, not only those with psilocybin

Cheers Mates

Extremely low-frequency electromagnetic fields
disrupt magnetic alignment of ruminants

Resting and grazing cattle and deer tend to align their body axes
in the geomagnetic North-South direction. The mechanism(s) that
underlie this behavior remain unknown. Here, we show that
extremely low-frequency magnetic fields (ELFMFs) generated by
high-voltage power lines disrupt alignment of the bodies of these
animals with the geomagnetic field. Body orientation of cattle and
roe deer was random on pastures under or near power lines.
Moreover, cattle exposed to various magnetic fields directly beneath
or in the vicinity of power lines trending in various magnetic
directions exhibited distinct patterns of alignment. The disturbing
effect of the ELFMFs on body alignment diminished with the
distance from conductors. These findings constitute evidence for
magnetic sensation in large mammals as well as evidence of an
overt behavioral reaction to weak ELFMFs in vertebrates. The
demonstrated reaction to weak ELFMFs implies effects at the
cellular and molecular levels.

Here I also abstracted from the text what I think might be relevant to the cancer problematics:

Kirschvink (25) and Kirschvink et al. (26) developed a simple biologically plausible biophysical model of the interaction of single-domain magnetosomes in a viscous fluid (cytoplasm) with a mechanically activated transmembrane ion channel. The model shows that motions of magnetosomes induced by an ELFMF on the order of 0.1 to 1 T can be large enough to open mechanically sensitive transmembrane ion channels, which, in turn, have the potential to influence a wide range of cellular processes. Depending on where such a channel is located, and whether it is coupled to secondary messenger systems, this process could influence the cell membranes, DNA synthesis, RNA transcription, calcium release, and virtually any ionically mediated cellular processes.

]burda_et_al_pnas-2009.pdf[/file]

Steve Conner

Sun Jan 03 2010, 10:20PM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Can we admit results that were gathered under the influence of magic mushrooms? Science is about things that have an objective existence, and hallucinogenic drugs have a tendency to make you see things that don't exist.

I don't see how the paper proves that power lines are dangerous, even to cattle or roe deer. All it shows is that the animals are sensitive to magnetic fields. It doesn't say anywhere that the earth's magnetic field is safe, but the magnetic field from power lines is somehow different and unsafe. To me this just sounds like the old Romantic fallacy that everything natural is good and everything man-made is bad.

The magnetosome hypothesis is interesting, but where's the evidence that human cells actually contain any magnetosomes? Should we be looking for them? How would we detect them?

Personally, I wouldn't like to live underneath power lines, but I have no scientific reason for this. Nobody can make me buy a house underneath them, even if it is suspiciously cheap.

Mates

Sun Jan 03 2010, 11:08PM

Registered Member #1025 Joined: Sun Sept 23 2007, 07:53PM
Location: Czech Rep.
Posts: 566

Ok, I already said that the drug mediated ability of sensing the power lines was not only my experience but than you can argue about collective hallucinations. But letâ€™s skip this, because I know what I felt but I can hardly persuade anyone that it was not hallucination. You can always try it to find out by yourselfâ€¦

You are right that the study says nothing about any danger coming from the power lines. But, such argument is not fair, because it also does not say that power lines are safe. What is important, even striking, that large mammals are capable of sensing electromagnetic field in the range of uT and the presence of power lines affects their basic behavioral tendencies. In case you watch carefully the video document which is announced in the beginning of this thread you can hear the words that EM field generated by power lines is so weak that it has absolutely no influence on humans. Thatâ€™s almost in direct conflict with the presented study, because phylogenetically deer is not so far away from human.

There is one more thing about the study which is for me much more interesting than any health associated risk. This study is basically an attack to the paradigm of our electromagnetic world. Hey guys, according to this study it seems we all might have sensors of EM field implemented in our bodies! Isnâ€™t it amazing news?

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