Creating Clusters and Fomenting Fear
In The Great Power-Line Cover-Up, Brodeur recounts a press conference held by the head of the Connecticut Department of Health Services's Division of Environmental Epidemiology and Occupational Health and an epidemiologist on his staff. They told reporters that despite the panic caused by Brodeur's "Calamity on Meadow Street" in The New Yorker, there was "absolutely no clustering" in Guilford and that the state investigation found "no cancer cluster on Meadow Street."
Brodeur called this conclusion "disingenuous, to say the least." His evidence: "The fact that three of the 29 primary brain and central-nervous-system tumors that occurred in Guilford during those 21 years developed among a handful of people who live in four of five adjacent houses on Meadow Street that are situated near a substation and very close to a pair of high-current distribution feeder lines, together with the fact that a malignant eye tumor, involving a tract of brain tissue, occurred in a woman who had lived in a sixth dwelling, next to a third feeder line, surely suggested that there was a cancer cluster of some significance on Meadow Street."
That this sentence is a grammarian's nightmare may not be coincidental. Brodeur excels at obfuscation. He also excels at what can be called "cluster gerrymandering." In political gerrymandering, the party that runs the legislature carefully draws the boundaries of an electoral district so as to squeeze as many voters from the opposite party into as few districts as possible. In Brodeur's case, he carefully draws his boundaries around cancer cases so that just as many as possible fall into his own self-defined cluster. If it serves his purpose to count only four houses from a distribution line, he will do it. But if there is a cancer in that sixth house, the area being considered will conveniently move out to that sixth house. Using such techniques, it is always possible to find a cluster, even though, as with some gerrymandered districts, you might end up with some rather bizarre shapes.
Consider the most important evidence in Brodeur's indictment of microwaves in his 1977 book, The Zapping of America. Throughout the book he refers to what he calls an extraordinary rate of cancer at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. The embassy was discovered in the early 1970s to have been bombarded by the Soviets for the previous two decades by microwave radiation for unknown reasons. After Zapping came out, a government study found that residents of the embassy were remarkably healthy and cancer-free overall. Looking at causes of death of both embassy males and females as separate groups and even breaking these further down into all causes, cancers only, and heart disease only--six different cohorts--the government study found fewer of all those than one would expect in a similar demographic group and fewer than in comparison embassies. It also looked at adult dependents and dependent children and found lower death rates than would be expected.
How did Brodeur deal with this? He declared the government study "had underestimated the health hazard of microwave radiation at the embassy by failing to point out that the death rate--particularly from breast cancer--was extraordinarily high [he doesn't say how high] among women living in apartments on the third through seventh floors of the embassy during the late 1960s and 1970s, when the irradiation of the embassy had become a source of major concern to the State Department and the CIA."
Note how Brodeur conveniently factors out the incidence (or more importantly non-incidence) of non-breast cancers, and of all non-cancerous ailments. This automatically excludes cancers in children and men, since they rarely get breast cancer. He also ignores all the workers save those on floors three through seven. He doesn't tell us that the embassy has 10 floors, meaning he ignores the first two and last three floors. Finally, he ignores the years prior to the late 1960s, even though the study covers years dating back to 1953. By taking his sharp instrument and expertly cutting out persons without cancer, he has created his cluster.
One key in identifying a legitimate cluster is that the diseases must be related. Every household is periodically struck by some sort of illness. A plausible theory of cluster causation would have to show similar illnesses, yet Brodeur does quite the opposite. He seems to connect absolutely every ailment contracted anywhere near power lines or power substations with EMF.
James Jauchem wrote in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology of "Calamity on Meadow Street" that "in addition to brain tumors, Brodeur seemed to blame exposure to EMF for the following ailments: Osgood Schlatter syndrome [a disease affecting the tendons of the kneecaps], ganglion and keratinous cysts [small pockets of fluid resulting from inflammation], scoliosis and other spinal deformities, parotid gland inflammation, hypospadias [an abnormality of the penis in which the urethra opens underneath], heart defects, lipodystrophy [a fatty tissue disease], glomerulonephritis [a kidney disorder], strep throat, fever, dark brown urine, pain and swelling in the eyes, swelling of the face, arm numbness, severe headaches, and keratoacanthoma [a disease of the eyes]."
Actually, in The Great Power-Line Cover-Up, Brodeur adds a number of other maladies to that list, including bleeding ulcers, benign ovarian tumors, epilepsy, and a growth on the hand merely described as "disabling." In a fit of understatement, Jauchem writes, "Surely it would be difficult to find a scientific basis for linking EMF exposure to this menagerie of ailments."
The Connecticut Academy would seem to agree. In its report it stated that "the diseases reported on Meadow Street were multiple, and there was not a recognizable cluster of any given disease as defined and could be evaluated by procedures of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Thus, the Academy concurs with the conclusion reached by the Connecticut Department of Health Services. There is no indication of a recognizable cluster of any type of relevant cancer."
Likewise, Dr. Michael B. Bracken, professor and vice chairman of epidemiology and public health at the Yale School of Medicine, told The New York Times, "There are clusters of any kind of cancer," but "in Guilford, it's not even a cluster because the cancers aren't related. These are individual tragedies."
Brodeur dismisses Bracken by pointing out that he had received a grant from the utility-industry funded Electric Power Research Institute of Palo Alto, California, for $2.5 million. Once again, the double standard is in effect: Two of the three American studies cited most often by those arguing an EMF-cancer connection, including Brodeur, were also funded by EPRI. Utilities finance practically all the research on EMF. If they didn't, nobody else would.
This puts Brodeur in a wonderful position. When a utility-funded study finds an EMF-cancer link, he says that the industry's own study has proved his point. When an industry-funded study or person argues against such a connection, he says it or he is untrustworthy because of who funded it.
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Still, as Brodeur repeatedly states in Currents of Death, there are "32 published studies demonstrating ELF [extremely low frequency, another term for EMF] effects." What Brodeur doesn't say is that hundreds of studies have been performed in which EMF shows no biological effects. Further, "biological effects" aren't necessarily harmful. As the authors of a report on EMF for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment noted, "A biological effect is not necessarily a significant health consequence."
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