Danger Of Strong Electromagnetic Fields

blueworld writes "U.S. Department of Energy researchers have discovered a possible cause for reported illness around high voltage power lines. They found that rats' bodies produced high levels of ozone when exposed to strong electrical fields. Electrically grounded water produced the same result when exposed to the fields. Apparently, the water in our bodies may be responsible for the health risks of high voltage power lines."

Comments

Re:the article is wrong

[ed333]

Actually, it says that exposure to the coronal discharge from a strong electromagnetic field causes ozone production in animals.

From the article:

"Negative-ion air generators usually don't produce much ozone and there is evidence that negative ions do clean the air and may provide health benefits."

So, perhaps you should read a bit closer.

Scientific Urban Legend

[Michael.Forman]

The jump to link this observed creation of ozone with the popularly held belief that power lines adversely affect health is erroneous.

In the original study which created the popular myth that power lines cause illness, the authors correctly found a correlation between living in the proximity of power lines and leukemia rates but never found causation. After much debate it was revealed years later that traffic density has an even greater correlation with the observed leukemia rates and provides a well understood and now obvious causation -- pollution. It just happens that power lines exist in areas of greater traffic density. Unfortunately, the general public was never copied on the second corrected paper and to this day believe that power lines have adverse health effects, when they instead should be worried about pollution from traffic.

Although the article states that the creation of ozone around power lines could be a health risk, the quantity of ozone created for various transmission structures is never quantified and nor compared with ambient urban polution. Thus at worst it is yet another vehicle for the propagation of a scientific urban legend or at best a warning to shut of indoor air ionizers whose output of ozone can lead to concentrations in excess those present of ambient pollution levels.

Michael.

Re:There was an article on this(+)

[Hal-9001]

The danger level is achieving 1 Telsa in the body. Now power lines may not reach that level (the EMF strength is reduced as the square of the distance after all), but things like electrical power meter boxes DO reach that kind of strength for a radius of 2-3 feet, and I was sleeping in such a field (there were 16 boxes on the other side of the wall. Based upon measurements of a single box in our house by the electric company, those boxes may have been producing as much as 25 Telsa at the point of my head, and less down the length of my body. That's thru a stone wall from the other side too.)

Where on earth did you live that you were subjected to an EMF field of 25 Tesla?! A typical MRI machine only generates a magnetic field of about 1 Tesla (see, for example, this link), and high magnetic field laboratories only achieve magnetic fields on the order of 10 Tesla with specially designed electromagnets powered by very high currents with lots of cooling (see, for example, this link) and only within small (maybe a cubic foot) volumes. I do hope that you can provide a citation to this article which claims causation between EMF and cancer, because I am only aware of studies claiming correlation between the two.

Re:Ways to cope?

[barakn]

just think about the inverse square law

I thought about it, and realized it applies to point sources, while a power line is a linear source following an inverse law, at least when one is closer to the line than the line is long.

Re:You misread what I said(+)

[barawn]

Based upon an electric company measurement, a electric meter box will general a 1 telsa field thru a stone wall (on the other side of the wall of a cinder block wall).

A 1T field will cause a hammer to stick to it almost a meter away, and walking near it with metal-toed boots will make you feel lighter. It will also erase credit cards, etc. 2.5T is an absolutely massive magnetic field. You can generally only get it with superconducting magnets, because you need a completely throbbing amount of current in a toroid.

I highly think your numbers are really really wrong. By that argument, a compass would still point towards an electric meter box from well more than 10 feet away! (If it's just the static field from a net current, it'd be an absolutely huge distance away : 2 miles! The static field from a net current drops as 1/D, not 1/D^3).

It should also be noted that magnetic induction is vector, not scalar: it doesn't add simply. Likely if you had several in a room, you could get any combination of all of the fields, including zero.

I would believe 2.5 mT, not 2.5 T. Even that's still a huge field. 1 A, at 1 meter, will give you about 1 milligauss. At 1 foot, then, it'd be *3* milligauss, or so. Maybe 9 if it's a bunch of conductors. Say 10 milligauss.

You'd then have to have 1 million amperes of current to generate 1 T.

Check those numbers again.

Some vs. Too Much

[DynaSoar]

Some have noted the incongruous ionizer ad on the page with the article. Others made statements regarding their own (apparently harmless) ionizer, or other relevant facts that seem to refute a basic point in the article. Well, they don't.

There is an optimum level of hyperoxides in the mammilian system. Too much and you get toxic damage and cell death. Too little and you get infections. This is the chemical portion of your immune system. You have an endocrine process for keeping it at the proper level. Your cells produce superoxide dismutase to rid themselves of excess hyperoxides (primarily hydrogen peroxide, H2O2). Things that suppress superoxide dismutase riase the amount of superoxides in your body and help fight infections. Up to a point.

Now, are anti-oxidants good for you? Only if you don't take too much, otherwise you weaken your immune system. Are hyperoxides (ozone, H202) good for you? Only up to a point, otherwise you fry your cells with oxidative stress. Then again, in some cases this isn't a bad thing. Cancer, which is cell reproduction and metabolism run wild, lives on anaerobic processes. Excess oxygen, particularly as hyperoxides, can kill it.

All of this is based on the work of Otto Warburg. He won the Nobel in medicine twice for this stuff. Its usefullness as well as its theoretical implications (which bear directly on the lack of understanding as to why this experiment would be significant if it holds up) are pretty much ignored these days, and that's a damn shame.

We're mostly equally ignorant of the finer implications of water in biological systems, ushc as the role of polymerized water at cell membranes. Two of the most important factors in life and we're terribly ignorant about both, making work such as this article fairly impossible for us to understand.

Not to be too down on the slashdotters in particular, it's pretty obvious if the researchers knew of Warburg's work, they were ignoring it. The government usually does. They'd prefer people not be too aware that air or water treated by exposure to UV rays can prevent or cure some illnesses. Up to a point. But up to that point, that's some other medicines people wouldn't have to buy.