Subject:  Required Reading!! Prof. Henshaw article (Royds).
Date:     Tue, 13 Mar 2001 060652 -0600
From:     Roy Beavers 
To:       guru 
--------------------------------------------------


........From EMF-L.......

If you have been reading the EMF-L traffic over the past 2-3 years,
you are already well informed about the following.....  But look!!

It is being treated as if the British were just now becoming aware!!

.......guru......

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Prof. Henshaw article
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 06:15:26 -0000
From: "John Royds" 
To: 
References: <3AAA4266.FE521C4F@emfguru.com>

Roy:

There was an excellent article in yesterday's (12th March) UK Times about
Prof. Denis Henshaw and powerlines
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,74-97331,00.html

I have pasted the article below.

regards,

John Royds
Timmore House
Newcastle
Greystones
Co. Wicklow
Republic of Ireland
tel/fax:  +353-1-281 9283
email:  royds@esatclear.ie

=========================
The Times (UK)


MONDAY MARCH 12 2001

Live and extremely dangerous

A study last week linked power lines to leukaemia. Physicist Denis Henshaw
says they also cause skin cancer, lung cancer, depression and 60 suicides a
year. Interview by Anjana Ahuja

Knowing what he knows, Denis Henshaw says he would never live in a house
near overhead power lines. A physics professor at Bristol University, he has
been studying the health effects of power lines since 1994.
Last week, one of the issues he has championed for years - the link between
childhood leukaemia and power lines - finally came out into the open. The
National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) concluded that exposure to
magnetic fields may double the chances of a child developing the disease.

While welcoming the report, Henshaw says that the focus on childhood
leukaemia, which is extremely rare, is a smokescreen that has served to
conceal the real perils of power lines.

He estimates that power lines notch up the following grim tally each year:
eight cases of childhood leukaemia, 14 cases of skin cancer, up to 400 cases
of lung cancer, several thousand cases of illnesses associated with air
pollution (such as respiratory disease, allergies and aggravated asthma),
9,000 cases of depression and 60 suicides.

The vast majority of these cases, he says, are caused by electrical effects,
not by the magnetic fields that were under investigation by the NRPB. "These
are figures comparable to the number killed on roads," says Henshaw, 54,
whose smart appearance makes him look more like a company executive than a
heretical professor. "But road deaths are spread throughout the country,
while only one in 50 of the population lives under power lines. So the rate
of casualty here is 50 times greater than the risks of being on the road."

He wants to see planning laws frozen so that no more homes are built near
power lines, and new cables are strung up as far as practicable from
populated areas or, where possible, buried.

He argues that although there may be no absolute causal proof yet, the
correlations are so strong and the biological mechanisms so plausible that
there should be a programme of "prudent avoidance". He says: "To say we need
another ten years of research means we will go precisely down the BSE
 route."

The Department of Health is listening - its officials have met him and seen
his experiments - but his views have largely been ignored or rubbished. The
electricity industry has accused him of scaremongering. He is not bothered:
"People who accuse you of scaremongering are those who don't want the truth
to come out. The utility companies can never admit in public that there is
an effect, because that would be admitting liability."

But he is bothered by the personal abuse sometimes levelled at him. It is
easy to compare him to Richard Lacey, the scientist who foresaw that BSE
could infect human beings, and to Sir Richard Doll, who first posited the
link between smoking and lung cancer, which was decried for decades by
tobacco companies. "It's exactly the same problem," he agrees.

"He (Doll) was described as a young upstart and suffered other terms of
abuse not terribly different from those used against us. The industry has
written stinking letters about me, but thankfully the university has stood
by me. I have been libelled on a number of occasions. We have had to remind
people that we will take action against them."

The NRPB has offended him three times; on each occasion he has received an
apology. He will not be pressed on the precise nature of the abuse, but says
that the NRPB once claimed that his assessments of risk were coloured by the
need to win research funds. He adds, somewhat indignantly, that his funds
from the Medical Research Council and the Department of Health have been won
through the normal process of academic assessment. The Foundation for
Children with Leukaemia has also supported his work.

Ironically, the latest NRPB report suggests that Henshaw's work is worth
further investigation. Yet the organisation has never consulted him
personally on power lines and health, which he finds "extraordinary"." Dr
Michael Clark, from the NRPB, says: "Professor Henshaw is a perfectly
reputable scientist who has an interesting and plausible hypothesis. But it
is a long way from that to a demonstrable health effect."

The dominant effect of the magnetic field, Henshaw says, is in influencing
mood. His survey of existing data leads him to the figure of 60 suicides a
year, as well as thousands of cases of depression. "There have been papers
on this for 20 years," he says. "What strikes me is that they all show
positive correlations and are not conflicting in any way. This is considered
biologically plausible - one mechanism is that magnetic fields disrupt the
production of melatonin in the body, which regulates mood. Another is that
magnetic fields induce electrical currents in the brain, which create an
electrical imbalance.

"Melatonin is produced by the pineal gland at night. Populations living near
these things are obviously sleeping near them, and they show striking
effects. Utility company workers show lower effects but they are exposed
during the daytime, so that's what you would expect."

He rejects the popular claim that people who live near power lines are
depressed for other reasons, perhaps because they simply don't like living
near them, or because they tend to belong to lower income groups.

But Henshaw and his colleague, Dr Peter Fews, say that the gravest physical
health problems stem from the electrical fields bathing power lines. In 1996
they reported that cables from domestic appliances, such as hairdryers,
acted like magnets for radioactive substances. These substances were formed
by the natural decay of radon in the atmosphere into so-called radioactive
"daughters". The implication was that radioactive products were attracted to
oscillating electrical fields. "Nobody seemed to spot the importance of
that," says Henshaw.

"The importance is that these substances, which are known carcinogens, can
land on you. When you stand under a power line, the electrical field
distorts around you because you are a conductor. These pollutants are
oscillating back and forth around you at 50Hz and they can land on you.
Applying the NRPB's own risk factors, you can predict an increase in skin
cancer."

He found that if a person spent 10 per cent of his time close to power
lines, he would be subjected to up to twice the acceptable level of
radioactivity, even in windy and wet weather. "Critics said that people don'
t spend 10 per cent of their time near power lines, but my argument is that
if they live there, they're entitled to," says Henshaw.

However, radon daughters pale into insignificance next to another set of
villains named by Henshaw - corona ions. High-voltage power lines produce a
strong electrical field on the line itself. This field is big enough to
ionise the air around it - in other words, to strip electrons from atoms.

The effect is like nudging a line of dominoes: the ionisation of one atom
triggers the ionisation of another, leading to a chain reaction. The result
is a line of charged, highly reactive particles streaming away from the
power cable. Henshaw has measured the streams as far away as several
kilometres from the line.

These charged particles, or corona ions, act as magnets for air pollutants,
including carcinogens such as aromatic hydrocarbons from car exhausts. The
electric charge gives the pollutant, when inhaled, a greater ability to
stick to the lung - so rather than being exhaled, pollutants become lodged.
"New York scientists have found that if there is a charge, pollutants of
this size are two or three times more likely to be deposited in the lungs,"
he says. "In the confined space of the lungs and airways, this charge makes
a big difference.

"The upshot is that you are retaining air pollutants, some of which are
known to be linked to lung cancer, in your lungs. You can then do a rigorous
assessment for lung cancer, which I put at between 250 and 400 cases a year.
There is actually a paper - not mine - that shows a doubling of lung cancer
under power lines, but it hasn't been talked about."

When the other effects of air pollutants, such as allergies and respiratory
disease, are factored in, Henshaw estimates that corona ions probably damage
a few thousand people every year. He also points out that corona ions have
been known about since the Fifties, and have been studied extensively by the
industry.

His final analysis is simply this: there is a vast body of evidence to
indicate an association between power lines and ill-health. It includes
cancers and non-cancers, affects both adults and children, and the risk of
ill-health is high enough to justify immediate action. This does not mean
that people living near power lines should panic - the risk of death on the
roads does not panic car-owners into selling their vehicles. Likewise, even
if several thousand people are at risk from power lines, the probability of
an individual falling ill is small.

However, given the response to BSE and the rail tragedies, the refusal to
acknowledge that there is a problem or to act on these statistics confounds
Henshaw. "I am struck by what society accepts," he says. "The Paddington
rail crash killed 31 and triggered a £1 billion commitment to advanced train
protection. Governments have to respond to risk assessment, not hide behind
wanting strict causal proof. Risk assessment grounded the whole Concorde
fleet. I'm saying that this is comparable.

"A hundred years from now, we will look back at pylons as relics of the
mid-20th century. It probably won't happen in five or ten years, but eventua
lly a new generation will come along, change things, and wonder why we did
nothing."


Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com