The original Soviet studies have led to an expanded effort to study the health risks of EMF
exposure to service personnel (66). Studies in other countries have begun to confirm the early evidence
that alterations in gonadal function are associated with workplace exposure. The results of a Swedish
study seemed to indicate that fewer children were born to exposed high-voltage workers than to
controls, and that the difference increased with the number of years of exposure (72). Later studies
showed that 8% of the offspring of exposed workers suffered from birth defects as compared to 3 % of
the offspring of the control-group members. In a Canadian study it was found that, prior to
commencement of employment, the 56 high-voltage workers studied had fathered approximately equal
numbers of male and female offspring, but that in children conceived thereafter, the number of males
born was almost six times the number of females (67).
Analysis
As was seen in chapter 1, the ability of electricity to cause tissue heating and shock was well
known even before the tum of the century. In the United States these became the only recognized
biological effects of electricity. As a consequence, from a side-effects viewpoint, tissue heating and
shock were the only hazards guarded against during the development of the electrical power and
communications industries. This approach translated into the 10,000-µW rule for permissible exposure
which was adopted by the military services and industry (but not by the federal government which pre-
empted the right to regulate EMFs and then elected not to establish any environmental or occupational
safety levels). In the Soviet Union, however, EMF regulation developed very differently. Soviet
investigators reported that electromagnetic energy could affect the central nervous, cardiovascular, and
endocrine systems without causing tissue heating or shock. These results led to the adoption of a 10-
µW rule for the workplace and a 1-µW rule for the general environment. The Soviets also adopted
regulations governing exposure to levels of power-frequency fields considered to be completely safe in
the West. The evidence (part four) now shows, overwhelmingly, that the Soviet approach was the
correct one. Indeed, no other outcome was possible given both the demonstrated role of intrinsic EMFs
in physiological regulation (chapter 2), and the sensitivity of living organisms to natural EMFs (chapter
3).
Since one or more mechanisms of interaction facilitated EMF-induced bioeffects in a
laboratory, and since the levels of EMFs studied in the laboratory are omnipresent in the environment,
it must be expected that the same or similar mechanisms will facilitate an interaction between
environmental EMFs and exposed subjects. It is therefore clear from the laboratory studies that,
because nonthermal EMFs are capable of altering physiological functions, chronic exposure to them in
the environment can result in some risk to health.
ELECTROMAGNETISM & LIFE - 142