Children who live close to an AM radio transmission tower may have an elevated risk of leukaemia, a study suggests.
Children who live close to an AM radio transmission tower may have an elevated risk of leukaemia, a study suggests.
South Korean researchers found that children who lived within 2 kilometres (about 1-1/4 miles) of an AM radio transmitter were twice as likely to develop lymphocytic leukaemia as children who lived more than 20 kilometres (approximately 12-1/2 miles) away.
There was no such link found for childhood brain cancer or any cancer in babies, according to the researchers, led by Dr Mina Ha of Dankook University College of Medicine.
For more details: http://www.health24.com/news/Enviro_Health_/1-1308,41325.asp
Selected quotes from the news report:
Children who live close to an AM radio transmission tower may have an elevated risk of leukaemia, a study suggests.
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Researchers have found limited evidence that living close to power lines might be a risk factor for childhood leukaemia. Studies on the possible health risks of radio and TV towers have produced mixed findings, according to Ha's team.
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The results, Ha's team concludes, "suggest a possible carcinogenic effect" of energy from AM radio towers. However, they say more research is needed to confirm the findings, and to figure out the biological mechanisms that may be at work.
Kinda iffy isn't it? The study suggests rather than shows. I have to allow, based on my experience with the press reporting on technical matters, that the reporter did a poor job of describing the study but it still appears tenuous from this report.
Since I have not read the study, I can't really comment about it in particular, but I have some general experience with this sort of epidemological research. I was involved in an experimental design where the hypothesis was that people living near power lines had elevated cancer rates. I found two good similar studies and one said yes, the other no. It was noted that the study which showed increased risk was for a population living in an industrial area with chemicals and other pollutants which may have confounded the data when compared to the control group which was not in such an area. The study also failed to measure the fields in the homes.
We dropped our study because we wanted to test the hypothesis using actual power line field measurements and understood the difficulty of doing this meaningfully. We concluded, based on preliminary work, that the fields varied so much within a building that there was no reliable way to assign a number to the exposure of the inhabitants. Moving a TV or lamp changes the exposure pattern.
Another study I found in my literature search showed an increased cancer rate among telephone exchange workers and concluded this was due to exposure to electric fields. It was later discounted because it failed to account for the chemical exposure such as is produced by the high volume of insulated wires and soldering in exchanges.
My comments do not refute this study but they do illustrate the extreme difficulty of extracting data when there are so many covariants present. Studies such as this should be reviewed with this in mind.
So, until more is known, my transmitter stays on.
Neil
I take all these reports with a grain of salt. If it were so,there would be more dead radio engineers and ham radio operators from it. There is no such epidemic being reported here. Remember when they tried to blame cellphones for the same thing? Meadow muffins!!!
I have been bathing in ac and rf fields all my life. I may be crazy,but not due to exposure to any of that stuff. There is actually PROOF that rf fields are beneficial in treating cancer,as our own local ham,engineer and now promoter of it,John Kanzius is now developing for use. See http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04207/351514.stm
Regards,Lee
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