In addition to concern about any possible causal link between mobile phones and cancer, some see dangers elsewhere, including electromagnetic fields around power lines. At least one older study suggested there is a connection between childhood leukemia and living near power lines.
A 2018 paper in Nature reviewed dozens of studies over decades and determined that kids who lived within 50 meters (165 feet) of a 200 kilovolt or higher power line had a slightly elevated risk of contracting leukemia.
But the researchers concluded that the intensity of magnetic fields couldn’t be the culprit because the intensity of the magnetic fields wasn’t high enough to explain the findings.
Power line magnetic fields top out at about 2.5 microteslas when you’re directly underneath, whereas the earth’s magnetic field, to which we’re all exposed all the time, varies from 25 to 65 microteslas, 10 to 26 times higher. In other words, it is impossible to separate the effect of living new power lines with generalized background effects.
“Even those researchers who have found a correlation between high-voltage power lines and childhood leukemia are dubious that what they’re measuring has to do with power lines at all,” though. In 2005, one researcher suggested that living near power lines is also correlated to something else that really does increase a child’s leukemia risk.
“Reasons for the increased risk, found in this and many other studies, remain to be elucidated,” wrote the researchers.
Some researchers have speculated that something else is the kind of hygiene, nutrition, general quality of life, and chemical exposure conditions that exist in communities through which high-voltage power lines are allowed to cross.
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