New study sees no heightened cancer risk for power workers

Low-frequency electromagnetic fields do not pose a cancer hazard to electricity workers, according to a wide-scale study that will be published on Tuesday.

The study looked at the health and employment records of 28,000 workers in electricity supply companies in Denmark, in a database going back to 1968.

Ill health and mortality among these workers were compared with the Danish Cancer Registry, where all new cases of cancer have been filed since 1942.
The researchers say they find no evidence to suggest that exposure to low-frequency electromagnetic fields boosted the risk of leukaemia, brain cancer and breast cancer, as some lab studies have contended.

The paper appears in Occupational and Environmental Medicine, a journal published by the British Medical Association (BMA).

Its authors, led by Christoffer Johansen of the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Copenhagen, say there is no need to tighten international safety guidelines on occupational exposure to these fields, which have a frequency of 50-60 Herz.

A review of evidence, carried out in 2002 by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, came to the same conclusion.