The dangers of EMR produced by High Voltage Power Lines

Household electricity alternate at a frequency of between fifty and sixty cycles per second (50-60 Hz), which is very close to the frequency at which our brains oscillate.

If scientists had realised early enough how harmful non-ionising electromagnetic energy fields can be to people who live near them, even at very weak strengths, the electricity generating utilities might have re-thought the design of the National Grid. Like some Scandinavian countries, they may have elected to place their generating stations close to the cities and industries that consume their power.

Too late now! It is estimated that over 80,000 UK citizens and more than a quarter million Americans live close to high voltage power lines. My advice to them all is, move house!

In Vancouver recently, the British Columbia BC Hydro utility in 1989 announced that it was prepared, upon request, to pay a fair market price to landowners concerned about electromagnetic emissions from its new high voltage power line. The utility received acceptances from 90% of owners approached. Only six people decided to stay.

It may one day become illegal for developers to build new houses near existing power lines, in which case your house or flat may suffer a dramatic fall in value, so get out while the going is good! Ideally, I'd like to see a Certificate of Electromagnetic Field Safety issued for every house put up for sale.

There is a good deal of evidence to support your house move. In 1974 Nancy Wertheimer and Ed Leeper documented 344 children with leukaemia who lived near high voltage power lines. This was 200% more than the incidence of leukaemia in the general population of children. In a later study Nancy also detected an increased risk of cancer among people working in electrical occupations.

Leukaemia cases often occur in clusters in the density of transmission lines emerging from power generating plants. At both Dounreay and Sellafield, unusually large clusters of childhood leukaemia have been noted. I visited the Sellafield area in September 1989 and correlated such leukaemia cases as I could find against the course of the power lines. I found that the lymphocytic leukaemia cases were never far from these lines. Another group of cancers, the myeloids, found more often among older people, seemed to cluster not round the lines, but round radio and TV masts.

In 1975 Goodman and others found that cell division (mitosis) was inhibited by EMR emanating from extra low frequencies (which includes household electricity).

In 1983 Michael McDowall found a correlation between people working in electrical occupations and the incidence of ill health.

In 1984 Miller and others found 1484 cancer cases amongst the 31543 male adult workers at the Ontario Hydro power station. Even lung cancer, traditionally associated with smoking, showed an elevated ratio. According to the researchers, this finding showed a clear connection between cancer and electric field exposure.

In 1986 Lennart Tomenius, a medical officer with the County of Stockholm, Sweden, found that twice as many of the homes of children who had developed cancer were near 200 kV lines. In 1989 Coleman and others found an increased incidence of lymphatic leukaemia among people who lived less than 25 metres from a power line.

Other studies found household electricity EMR to inhibit growth in chicks and rats, as well as in embryonic tissue cells. In 1988 Dan Lyle and others proved this to be true for human T-cells as well.

I once visited a farm in Somerset where a woman had begun experiencing health defects after two years in her new home. An electricity transformer was situated about twenty metres from her property. She suffered from chronic asthenia, severe loss of weight, colonic complaints, candidiasis and sleep apnoea - the all too familiar symptoms of an immune deficit.

The electric fields inside the woman's house were fairly normal on the ground floor, but upstairs in the bedrooms it were abnormally high, grading down from 70 volts per metre (V/m) at the end nearest the transformer, to 30 V/m furthest away. As if from instinct, the woman was sleeping in the furthest bedroom, but the electric fields were still several times the residential norm of around 5 -10V/m. The doctors were baffled. None of their treatments had any impact on the chronic ear, nose and throat problems the lady had experienced for years.

My advice to her was to ask the Electricity Board to move the transformer to a more distant pole, which would have inconvenienced none. To date this has not been done.

Dr. Morton Wheeler, (funded by the U.S. Department of Energy at Rochester University), claimed that the magnetic fields from high voltage lines were lower than those propagated by a 150 Watt light bulb. In reply, Nancy Wertheimer pointed out that this would only be the case if the lines were perfectly balanced. Indeed, I have measured fields inside bedrooms well over 70V/m (the normal strength in the room centre of any home is about 1-10V/m), which disappear the moment the mains electricity is turned off. This proved that it is the domestic internal wiring circuit that caused the high field.

The electric fields from the twin high voltage lines emerging from the north of the Calder Hall power station (in England) exceeds 50 V/m at a distance of 110 metres and at a height of 1.5 metres from the ground (the height of a standing person's head). These lines therefore irradiate the edges of the villages of Beckermet, Moorhouses and Cleator Moor to the north of Sellafield. The southern high voltage line irradiates part of Drigg to the south. All these villages have witnessed cases of childhood leukaemia in recent years.

Please note, it is always the lymphatic type of leukaemia that shows raised incidence. In other words, something happens to the human lymphocyte competence in the bloodstream as a result of exposure to electromagnetic fields.

We are beginning to know how to recognise the initial signs of electro-stress, thanks to a pioneering set of studies by a Birmingham doctor, Stephen Perry. He examined the addresses of some 600 suicides reported in the Birmingham area and found that homes where the magnetic field was relatively high (above 1mG), the relative risk of depressive illness was elevated by 150%. Perry's results, which were found to occur even when the high voltage lines were buried and the subjects were unaware of their existence, were confirmed by Russian studies that also identified cardiovascular effects.

I once found a similar effect in the housing estate of Fernhill, Mid Glamorgan. In discussing this with several residents who had not been there long I was told that since arriving on the estate they had become depressed and would be glad to leave. There had also been two suicides, not to mention many acts of violence and at least one murder there. I suggested to one of the residents who lived very near the high voltage line that he turned off the mains electricity. He reported, literally within seconds, that the pressure in his neck had subsided. At the time, he had no idea of the research that had found that blood pressure is affected by electromagnetic fields. So, high blood pressure (which can also lead to aggression) is another indicator.

No matter what official denials claim, the scientific evidence has convinced me that these risks are real and seriously under-reported.

If you find yourself inexplicably depressed or suicidal and you live near a power line, it's time to get out before some tragedy occurs. If you don't you may, like the inhabitants of Fishpond in Dorset (England) where a power line stretched through their village, also suffer from hypertension, epilepsy, dizziness, certain heart conditions or even death from cardiac arrest.