Linking Low-Frequency Electromagnetic Radiation Fields and Cancer

What is the link between low frequency electromagnetic fields and cancer? The following section is an excrept from from Chapter 8, Man Made Electromagnetic Radiation Fields, of the book "Cross Currents: the Perils of Electrical Pollution" by Robert O. Becker.

Linking Low-Frequency Fields and Cancer

Dr. Wendell Winters of the University of Texas had been contacted by the New York Department of Health to investigate the effects of 60-Hz fields on cells of the immune system.  In the course of this work he had exposed human cancer cells in culture to the same fields, without specifically obtaining approval to do so.  He reported that cancer cells increased their rate of growth by several hundred percent with only a twenty-four hour exposure and that this growth rate was thereafter apparently permanent.  The New York State Department of Health sent a team of investigators to Winter’s laboratory.  They reported that the work was not reproducible and was of questionable validity.  The department also funded another investigator to “repeat” Winters’s study.  This investigator reported that he was unable to duplicate Winters’s results; however, he had not done the experiment in the same fashion.

Work was then carried on outside the confines of the New York State study by Winters and his colleague Dr. Jerry Phillips of the Cancer Research and Treatment Center in San Antonio, Texas.  Winters’s initial observation was confirmed and extended, leading to several recent publications in reputable, peer-reviewed scientific journals.  At this time, the scientific evidence is absolutely conclusive:  60-Hz magnetic fields cause human cancer cells to permanently increase their rate of growth by as much as 1600 percent and to develop more malignant characteristics.

These results indicate that power-frequency fields are cancer promoters--that is, they promote the growth o human cancers.  Winters and Philips worked with human cells that were already cancerous, so they could not draw any conclusions as to the possibility that these fields could cause cancer .  The promoting effect speeds up the clinical course of any established cancer and makes it that much more difficult to treat. Cancer promoters, however, have major implications for the incidence of cancer because they increase the number of cases of cancer that become evident.  We are constantly exposed to cancer causing agents in our environment, ranging from carcinogenic chemicals to cosmic rays.  As a result, we are always developing small cancers that are recognized by our immune systems are destroyed.  Any factor that increases the growth rate of these small cancers gives them an advantage over the immune system, and as a result more people develop clinical cancers that require treatment.

In 1988, Dr. Marjorie Speers of the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Texas Medical branch, Galveston, reported a significant increase in the incidence of brain tumors in workers occupationaly exposed to all types of electromagnetic fields.  Specifically, she reported that workers exposed to 60 Hz fields in electric-power utilities had an incidence of brain tumors thirteen times greater than that in a comparable unexposed group.

There are many other epidemiological studies indicating a relationship between occupational exposure to electromagnetic fields and cancers of many types.  Most of these studies suffer from the shortcoming that the fields to which the workers were exposed varied from microwave to the 60-Hz electric-power frequency.  It is, therefore, difficult to assign the risk to any particular frequency region; this has been used as an excuse to discount the importance of these studies. In my opinion, this is a specious excuse. The laboratory data clearly indicate a direct relationship between both ELF and microwave fields and cancer.  Taken as a whole, the epidemiological data clearly indicate a direct clinical relationship.  This view is supported by doctors H.D. Brown and S.K. Chattopadhyay of the Department of Biochemistry at Rutgers University.  After surveying the entire literature on the relationship between all electromagnetic fields and cancer, they concluded that “animal carcinogensis studies and human epidemiological data indicate that exposure to non-ionizing radiation can play a role in cancer causation.”