Shock Journalism

The junk reporting behind the power line-cancer connection

Michael Fumento from the January 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 5)

According to Brodeur, the evidence of these power line studies is utterly conclusive. His books would be meaningless if they weren't. As their titles make clear, it's not merely that the weight of evidence says power lines cause illness, but that the evidence is so overwhelming that to deny it is to be engaged in a coverup.

But not even the scientists whose work Brodeur cites are as certain as he is. Epidemiology is a crude instrument, rather like the first radar units. As the occasional Cuban defector who flies into U.S. airspace undetected shows, even today identifying a single plane can be tough. Both radar and epidemiology are much better suited to detecting major problems. Epidemiology can detect strong cancer correlations like smoking and lung cancer fairly readily. But the risk ratios from the childhood leukemia-EMF studies, if they show a correlation at all, are in the area of two to three, meaning a two or three times higher risk of contracting the disease, compared to a 10- to 30-fold difference in cancer risk between cigarette smokers and nonsmokers.

Those small risk ratios indicate that the risk of EMF, assuming there is one, is much smaller than such clear carcinogens as tobacco smoke. And such a small blip on the risk radar screen may prove to mean nothing at all. No one study is definitive. Rather, researchers look at each study the way a professor would look at a quiz. Any student may have a particularly good or bad day, and quizzes may be flawed, but averaged over the course of a semester, enough quizzes provide a fairly good assessment of where a student stands.

In the case of EMF and cancer, there have been so many quizzes that it is best to look at the broad overviews in various government reports rather than focus on each one individually.

In May 1989, the OTA released a report, one line from which appeared in a multitude of articles and in Brodeur's book Currents of Death: "As recently as a few years ago, scientists were making categorical statements that on the basis of all available evidence there are no health risks from human exposure to power-frequency fields. In our view, the emerging evidence no longer allows one to categorically assert that there are no risks."

Unfortunately, most of these articles and Brodeur's book neglect to complete the sentence: "...but it does not provide a basis for asserting that there is a significant risk." For those whose jobs expose them to EMF, it concluded, "the evidence to suggest that exposure to extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields presents an occupational hazard is extremely weak."

With childhood leukemia, the EMF danger that has gotten the most attention, the OTA report found that "collectively the studies do not provide good evidence that ELF exposure increases the risk of leukemia." Nowhere in Brodeur's work does this line appear. But, they added, carefully hedging their conclusion, "at the same time the evidence precludes categorical statements that no such risk exists."

The British equivalent of the OTA report is considerably more helpful, since it appeared three years later. It looked at 80 surveys of cancer in electrical workers, eight of childhood leukemia, and several of adults exposed in non-occupational settings. This report found that "while there is suggestive evidence of an association between childhood cancer and residential electromagnetic field exposure, the methodological shortcomings of the studies are such that the evidence is insufficient to allow conclusions to be drawn."

Where the OTA report said there was "not enough evidence to judge the possibility of an association" between residential exposure and adult cancers, the British panel took a firmer position: "The data on adult cancers and electromagnetic field exposure are sparse, and available evidence does not suggest electromagnetic field exposure is a risk factor."

At the request of the Department of Labor, which was responding to the Brodeur articles, the Committee on Interagency Radiation Research and Policy Coordination (part of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy) ordered a review of the literature. Conducted by a panel of independent scientists convened by Oak Ridge Associated Universities, it concluded that "there is no convincing evidence in the published literature to support the contention that exposures to extremely low frequency electric and magnetic fields generated by sources such as household appliances, video display terminals, and low power lines are demonstrable health hazards." It went on to apply relative risk standards in saying that "in the broad scope of research needs in basic science and health research, any health concerns over exposures to ELF-EMF should not receive high priority."

What does Brodeur make of these reports? He ignores the British one in his writings. The OTA one is cited briefly in support of his position in both Currents of Death and The Great Power-Line Cover-Up. This is notwithstanding that the chief author of the OTA report, Carnegie-Mellon Professor M. Granger Morgan, blasted Currents of Death in a review in Scientific American.

The Oak Ridge report merits but a few sentences from Brodeur, mostly an ad hominem attack on one of its authors, Dimitrios Trichopoulos. Trichopoulos, suggests Brodeur, has compromised his position because he "had testified as a consultant for Crowell & Moring, the electric utility industry's lead attorneys, at the Scientific Advisory Board meetings in the winter of 1991."

Trichopoulos is the chairman of the department of epidemiology at the Harvard University School of Public Health. His articles in major medical journals have covered the range of epidemiological subjects from hepatitis C to tobacco smoke to breast cancer. But to Brodeur he's just a utility industry sell-out. Brodeur strangely thinks that people form their opinions based on who hires them as consultants, rather than being hired as consultants based on their opinions. If he applied this standard fairly, Brodeur would point out that Dr. Samuel Milham Jr. of the Washington State Department of Health and Social Services, whose work Brodeur heavily relies on in both of his last two books, was an expert witness for the plaintiffs in a San Diego trial alleging that EMF had caused a serious illness. Brodeur discusses the trial but neglects to mention Milham's role.

The only governmental overview that Brodeur dwells on at all isn't one. That is, it was never released except in draft form. The report composed a large part of Currents and showed up on no fewer than 67 pages of The Great Power-Line Cover-Up, out of 308 in the whole book. Yet this document was clearly marked "Workshop Review Draft" and had on each page the words "DRAFT--DO NOT QUOTE OR CITE." None of which stopped Brodeur from persistently quoting and citing it. As James Jauchem noted in a critical article in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, "Brodeur seemed to think that being asked not to cite a draft report was synonymous with a 'cover-up.'"

But that's not the only conspiracy involved, according to Brodeur. An earlier EPA draft had used the term "probable" carcinogen but after internal review downgraded this to "possible," which has no official meaning. (Essentially, anything that hasn't been absolutely studied to death is considered a possible carcinogen.) That, too, said Brodeur, could only have been the result of conspiracy. But according to EPA official Dennis O'Connor, "If we had determined that it was a proven cause of cancer in humans, trust me there would have been pressure in succeeding years to deal with that." The agency sent the report on to an advisory board which turned it back for a number of technical reasons such as the need to look only at peer-reviewed material, according to officials. A completely new draft is scheduled for release next March.