Dirty Tricks by Powerful Industries Suppress the Truth About EMR Health Risks—Electricity Production

by Heidi Stevenson

17 January 2010

The telecommunications and electricity production industries use Big Tobacco's techniques to suppress information about health damage from electromagnetic radiation (EMR) Suppression of information. Making false claims. Promises to do research. Stonewalling. Attacking the whistleblowers. There seem to be no limits to the games played to protect profits.

The stories of the two industries occur during the same timespan. The methods are much the same. This is the story of how the electricity production industry covered the truth about EMR health risks:

Electric Companies and Junk Science

During the early '70s, word started coming out of the USSR that EMR was suspected of causing the health problems of workers in electric stations. The research focused on electric, but not magnetic, fields and made little progress. Later, a major study that appeared to show health effects from magnetic fields⁽¹⁾ made them the focus.

In 1995, researcher Canadian Tony Miller, University of Toronto, showed that leukemia rates increase when both electric and magnetic fields are taken into account.⁽²⁾

Miller's research was done in conjunction with a French study. The French study didn't find an increase in leukemia. They did, however, find a 7-fold increase in brain cancer for people with 25 years' exposure to electric fields.⁽³⁾⁾ The authors, Marcel Goldberg and Pascal Guénel, called the result "remarkable".⁽⁴⁾⁾ Note that there is one distinction between the two studies that could explain the difference. The French electrical frequency is 50 Hz, but it's 60 Hz in Canada.

The Power Workers Union of Canada was quite concerned about these results. They called for "immediate employer and government action to protect workers". The industry's response, though, was to stonewall. The employees of Ontario Hydro had participated in Miller's study. The company's representative promised they'd do more studies, and stated, as is so often heard now:

We would be irresponsible at this point to change anything or alarm anyone until the study is replicated. Further studies are needed.

Only in corporate speak is it considered irresponsible to be concerned about human safety. Of course, no attempts to replicate Miller's study were ever made.

Enter the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)

EPRI claims to be nonprofit and independent. However, it is 100% funded by its members, which are all electricity suppliers.⁽⁵⁾ Like Ontario Hydro, EPRI didn't try to replicate Miller's experiment. Instead, they had pet scientists, Leeka Kheifets and John Swanson, try to debunk his research.

Kheifets had free rein over the data from a University of Southern California epidemiological study of electrical workers, which she'd managed years earlier. She was not a scientist on the team and she received no author credit. The study was done on magnetic, not electrical, fields. Electrical field data existed on only about one-fourth of the study's target population. There was no electrical field data on powerline workers, the ones with the greatest electrical field exposure. In fact, there was electrical field data for only six employees.

Based only on this sparse data, in 1997 Kheifets published a short paper claiming "little support for an association between occupational electric field exposure and leukemia".⁽⁶⁾ According to Microwave News, this was the last paper published on the subject.⁽⁷⁾ For a more in-depth discussion of the electric power industry's lack of research and junk science on EMR, read The Real Junk Science of EMFs: Stop Electric Field Cancer Research, Say Industry Scientists. They refer to Kheifets junk study this way:

In the mid-1990's, when she was at EPRI, Kheifets was one of the few people in America who was in a position to fund a replication effort. Instead, she published a junk paper and dressed it up as a refutation. Now she and Swanson are trying to use that same paper to finish the job.

By "finish the job", the authors are referring to an upcoming paper to be published in February 2010 in Bioelectromagnetics. In it, they will claim that there is "little basis for continued research" on health risks from EMR. They will claim that research has come to a dead end. They argue that there should not be any more research on the issue.

Kheifets and Swanson are bought-and-paid-for minions of the electric industry. They do no genuine research, but do much of their dirty work to squelch legitimate research. They serve their masters well.