Friday, May 2, 2008
EMF stopped causing cancer in 1997, but no one bothered to tell Jim
Motavalli, who wrote an Automobile column in the Sunday New York Times
about the risks of EMF in hybrids. According to Motavalli the National
Cancer Institute studied the cancer risks associated with electromagnetic
fields. And so it did - but it couldn't find any. You might think
Motavalli would at least check the Archives of the New York Times. On
July 3, 1997, the day the massive four-year NCI study of power lines and
cancer appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Gina Kolata
reported in the Times that the study was unambiguous and found no health
effects associated with electromagnetic fields. An editorial in the same
issue of the Journal put it in perspective: "Hundreds of millions of
dollars have gone into studies that never had much promise of finding a
way to prevent the tragedy of cancer in children. It is time to stop
wasting our research resources." It all began in 1979 when Nancy
Wertheimer, an unemployed epidemiologist, and her friend Ed Leeper, drove
around Denver looking for common environmental factors in the homes of
childhood victims of leukemia. It practically jumped out at them - every
home had electricity. Their study was so flawed it would have been
laughed off but for Paul Brodeur, a scientifically-ignorant writer for The
New Yorker. He wrote a series of terrifying articles about power lines
and cancer that were collected in a 1989 book, Currents of Death.
President Bush has asked Congress for an additional $770M in emergency
food assistance for poor countries. The only complaint from Congress was
that it won't be available until the new fiscal year in October. But
these countries are poor because they are overpopulated, undereducated,
and women have no control over reproduction. Food won't solve the problem
unless it's linked to women's rights including easy access to the pill and
education in its use.
It passed Congress and Bush says he will sign it. That's good news; it's
tough enough getting stuck with risky genes, without being denied
insurance or a job because of your genome. The growth of genetic tests
makes passage of the bill urgent, but it's Louise Slaughter (D-NY) who
almost alone pushed the bill for 13 years. Daughter of a Kentucky coal
miner, she earned degrees in microbiology and public health from the
University of Kentucky.
There is a lot happening on this complicated planet besides greenhouse
warming, so it's not too surprising that things added up to give us a
little cooling. And give the warming deniers a rare - and temporary -
victory. As we understand it, vacillating ocean floes spell a cooling
trend up until about 2015, and then we can get back to warming. Oh sure,
say the warming deniers.
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