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Fishpond lies at the head of a steep and narrow valley rising dramatically from the coast nearly a thousand feet below. It is extremely beautiful; in fact the valley now belongs to the National Trust, and in former years the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro and his son Lucien, also a painter, spent much time there; one of Camille Pissarro's Fishpond paintings, called The Gap in the Hills, is in the collection of the Tate Gallery. The earth is iron-bearing (the head of the valley is flanked by two Iron Age forts) and the whole area is riddled with underground streams and earth faults - in fact it is part of the well known and treacherous Dorset coastal slide. Further, strong south-westerly gales and heavy sea mists are funneled up from the English Channel below. All these environmental factors seem to render the area highly susceptible to electromagnetic interactions, though none of the authorities seem to have taken that into consideration either when planning the route or later after receiving complaints, nor in similar situations elsewhere, and the villagers were certainly not aware of it. I can tell the story of this search in some detail because, as a resident there from 1973 to 1984, I myself felt the effects and embarked on the search - although to describe the full extraordinary sequence of events in this discovery would take a whole book certainly longer than the Tales of a Thousand and One Nights. However, the simple outline of the story shows that the gulf between science and ordinary life is not as great as has been suggested, and that it is imperative for medical doctors of every discipline to learn again to consider all aspects of illness in relation to the whole environment. When the HV (high voltage) lines were first set up over Fishpond, the villagers not only objected on aesthetic grounds, but feared that the unsafe terrain posed serious dangers (about 20 out of a total of 30 people lived within 100 meters of the lines). Almost immediately they discovered another unpleasant aspect of this technological barbarity: that is, the buzzing or singing of the lines in misty weather and the howling or clashing of the conductors in high winds. Separators were installed which alleviated the clashing, but not the howling, which often reaches banshee-like levels and produces a relentless throbbing throughout the body. When I moved to Fishpond in 1973, to a house immediately under the lines, I knew nothing of this; I thought the lines hideous, but the valley was so beautiful and the nearby school for my sons so good that I felt I could accept them. We moved in during a spell of unusually hot weather, during which I seemed to feel more than usually exhausted by the heat, in fact too tired to explore the lovely valley at all. I decided to paint most of the rooms of the house, which I did, but lost my voice for over two weeks. I attributed this to some viral infection, especially when my voice came back after a cracking thunderstorm in which the hot weather broke and the pylon above our garden burned with blue flame. But as the autumn drew on, I found that I still experienced strange lassitude, headaches which I had never had before, and an odder feeling which I had difficulty in describing even to myself. It was as if I had some kind of a mental barrier between my thoughts and myself so that I found it hard even to write a letter. Since I was working as an editor and proof-reader, I found this mental block very disturbing and decided it must be due to the South Coast weather, as it always seemed to be more pronounced on wet, windy or misty days. Later I discovered that another villager, who had been born and bred there but had never experienced this strange feeling before the lines were erected, described it far more graphically as 'like being caught in a net'. Gradually, as I began to get to know the other villagers, I found that many of us, as different as we were, shared the same unusual mixture of debilitating symptoms - headaches across the eyes, exhaustion, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, even occasional dizziness, or palpitations of the heart, with trembling - especially in extremes of wet, windy, very cold or very hot weather. Although I come from a medical family I have no scientific or medical training and therefore thought of this as simply a response to prevailing weather conditions, though extreme and somewhat unfortunate; and, until fairly recently, that is the way in which far better informed people have also considered it. But later in that same year I happened upon an article by an electrical engineer describing the effects upon office and factory workers of abnormal ionization of the air caused by central heating or air-conditioning. These effects - headaches, eye-strain, exhaustion, dizziness - tallied so exactly with ours that I suddenly wondered if it might be not just the weather - which was common to all of Fishpond, and indeed to all the south west of England - that was causing our symptoms, but possibly also the other factor we shared in common, namely the overhead power-lines, producing abnormal ionization of the air. This question has been very difficult to resolve because it has proved so difficult to measure such subtle changes in the open environment and, moreover, the measuring equipment itself is affected by the electromagnetic fields radiating from the power-lines. Nevertheless, it did lead us into the gradual understanding of these fields, hitherto unknown to almost all of us. A retired electrical engineer, formerly an inspector of factories, who moved to Fishpond in 1976, dismissed the idea of ionization or other effects, but did theorize that the unpleasant throbbing or pulsing which we felt in high winds might be attributable to subsonic harmonic oscillations generated by the lines. In 1980 Dr Cyril Smith first visited Fishpond. Then, and on several subsequent occasions, he took seriously the symptoms that we all experienced and measured the electric and magnetic fields around Fishpond. But at the very beginning of our inquiries, in 1973, none of us had any notion of such things. It proved almost impossible to pursue even the idea of abnormal air ionization; the electrical engineer, Mr Cecil Laws, said he could not help us; the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) said that nobody else around the country had complained so therefore there couldn't be anything in it; the DHSS said the work quoted by Mr Laws (done by Dr Albert Krueger, in California) had been disproved by subsequent research elsewhere - which later turned out not to be the case. Finally, in desperation, we tried the telephone information service and, by great good luck, found a friendly and sympathetic operator who recognized our plight and looked through the London directories until she happened upon the Institute for Occupational Health and Safety. This was a major breakthrough for us because in its files we discovered the first indication that anyone in the professional world was considering possible power-line health effects. The study in question was carried out in France in 1970 on the health of people living within 100 meters of HV lines (Strumza, 1970). These subjects did not appear to be more unhealthy than a control group living at a distance, but they did pay more visits to consultant specialists. Although this report may appear vague and inconclusive at first sight, it is in fact very important, for at least two reasons (besides the simple fact that anyone had decided to do it). First, it was undertaken fairly soon after HV power-line systems were erected throughout Europe, and not then normally at the present high voltage levels; it is now known that ELF electromagnetic health effects are time-related and cumulative, depending on the length of exposure. And, second, although the people did not appear to be significantly more 'ill' than the control group, their local doctors were baffled enough by their variety of symptoms to refer many more of them to specialists. In the light of what has been discovered since 1982 by Dr Cyril Smith and Dr jean Monro about the relevance of the allergic responses of sensitive individuals to the particular bio-cautioned the authorities and the public in some detail, but also gave us one of our greatest tools in our campaign - for she explained how the presence of the electromagnetic field, due to corona discharge from the lines, can be demonstrated by holding up an unconnected fluorescent light tube beneath them. This then glows in an eerie, almost uncanny way, wavering only with the wind, like a candle. Of course, this in itself proves nothing except that there is an electric field and enough current passing through the person to ground to produce the light intensity observed. But it was enough to attract attention from the media and also from people who previously had only laughed at us, so that we finally felt bold enough to ask our Member of Parliament, Mr (now Sir) Jim Spicer, for help. He was immediately sympathetic (and has always remained so) and encouraged us to find whatever other material we could. So we went back to the Institute for Occupational Health and Safety, and this time discovered two studies, from Italy (Meda et al., 1969) and the USSR (Danilin et al., 1969), on the health of workers in 500 kV electrical substations. Both studies, quite unrelated, reported effects on the cardiovascular system, the peripheral nervous system and the leucocyte count (which was raised). These effects tallied so exactly with unexpected findings in a recent medical check-up I had had that we felt certain, at last, that we could substantiate our claims. Had we known how long this would take (and is still taking) we would not have rejoiced quite so early - but at least we had now aroused public attention, although originally that had never been our aim; and it was from a member of the public that we received our next vital help. In 1975, a London librarian, Miss Winifred Whiteman, heard of our story, and because she had been researching this subject as a result of an extraordinary electrically-related accident suffered previously, sent us a list of all the scientists in the West who were working on ELF electromagnetic bio-effects. The list was dauntingly long - and equally discouraging was the fact that none of those scientists was working in the UK. But we divided the list up among ourselves to contact; and as it happened, the very first letter I wrote struck gold. This was to Dr Andrew Marino, a biophysicist, who at the time was working for the US government together with Dr Robert Becker, an orthopedic surgeon. They had been asked to study bio-effects of ELF electromagnetic fields (possibly as a result of the findings of Project Sanguine) and in their laboratory work on rats and mice had found stunted growth and decreased fertility within three generations. More than that, both Dr Marino and Dr Becker were at that moment testifying on behalf of the public at a long and very acrimonious hearing held by the New York State Public Service commission concerning a proposal to run 765 kV power-lines across the State to connect into the Canadian system. The decision to testify was taken entirely by Dr Becker and Dr Marino themselves as responsible medical scientists, and it cost them not only years of work and time but also professional slander and even the security of their jobs; and, in Dr Becker's case, possibly also a Nobel Prize, for which he was being considered because of his work on mending difficult bone fractures and reducing edemas with externally-applied ELF electromagnetic fields. Indeed, it was because of this work that Dr Becker decided to testify at the hearing; he had seen how, almost miraculously, such electromagnetic fields helped damaged cells to repair themselves and regrow in their biological formation, but he had serious doubts about similar effects on normally healthy tissue subjected involuntarily to these fields - doubts which are now being vindicated. After the New York State hearing, he wrote a book on electromagnetism together with Dr Marino, the most comprehensive and scientifically based book published up to that time (Becker and Marino, 1982) which carries further Szent-Gyorgyi's theory of semiconducting crystalline lattices in biological structures; later, he published a second work (Becker and Selden, 1985), which is the testimony of his life's work as a pioneering doctor and in which he proposes a biological theory (which he also substantiates) that will almost certainly bring about fundamental changes in our understanding of the origins and workings of life on Earth. When Dr Marino answered my first letter, he enclosed copies of Dr Becker's testimony (which warned unequivocally against the random subjection of healthy systems to ELF electromagnetic fields) and of his own as yet incomplete cross-examination, which was not only illuminating but also brilliantly argued in the face of deliberate hostility. Much later, when I finally met Dr Marino, I commented on this and he told me that he had taken an extra degree in law because he felt, as a biophysicist, that there were so many dangers in our present environment that someone should be fully qualified to argue on the public's behalf. To know that we had people of such caliber behind us was an almost miraculous step forward for us. Unfortunately, the authorities in Britain, like those in the United States, did not see it in the same way. In 1976 our MP had arranged a private meeting between Fishpond residents and the CEGB to discuss our concern; when we presented the material we had gathered with such difficulty one senior official put his head in his hands and groaned, 'This is what comes of public education'; Dr Becker and Dr Marino were dismissed as 'troublemakers'. It was this attitude which decided us to help the villagers of Innsworth in their Public Inquiry, and although this turned out to be a bitter and in the end a losing battle for us, once again coincidence and good science both came to our aid. During the summer of 1978 I had read an article (quite literally in the paper wrapped round the fish) about the work of Dr Leslie Hawkins at the University of Surrey, in Guildford, who was studying abnormal ionization of the air and its effects (Hawkins, 1981). We wrote to ask if he might come to Fishpond and measure ionization levels under the power-lines. He replied that he would indeed be interested, but did not know exactly when he could come. As it turned out, he found he could come only in early October, after the Innsworth Inquiry had begun. I therefore left the Inquiry and returned to Fishpond to meet him. Dr Hawkins' findings were so unusual, even on a still and sunny autumn day, that he felt they should be reconfirmed in case his measuring equipment was being affected by the fields. What he found were not only abnormal balances of air ions, tending especially toward a preponderance of positive ions, as before a thunderstorm or one of the world's debilitating winds such as the Mistral or the Santa Ana, but also the extraordinary phenomenon, immediately below the HV lines, of a total absence or cancellation of positive and negative ions, a condition in which laboratory animals had been found to die within three months. Although Dr Hawkins had once built a theoretical model of a situation like Fishpond's without knowing it existed, it was this result which startled him and made him wonder about the power-line effect on his meter. In fact, even today no one can be certain of the performance of their ionization meters in such an environment. Funds to continue such studies have been promised by bodies such as the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB), but then, mysteriously, never materialized. However, on the day of Dr Hawkins's visit to Fishpond (without which I would have been at the Public Inquiry in Gloucestershire) I received a telephone call from a physicist, Dr David Smith, at the University College of North Wales in Bangor. He had earlier heard a BBC radio program about our dilemma, in which Dr Marino was interviewed, as was also an Electricity Board official who attributed our symptoms to fanciful fears of the pylons dominating our village. Dr Smith became interested and in fact began a correspondence with the CEGB on the subject; then, when he saw a very small mention of the Innsworth Inquiry in the national press, he rang to ask if he might testify in corroboration of our evidence because he felt that a very important factor was being glossed over by the authorities. This is called electric field enhancement and is known to all students of physics, though not normally to the general public. The electric fields under the lines at Fishpond has been measured as reaching 6 kV per meterat their maximum (which was already above USSR safety standards for living in the vicinity of HV lines). But these measurements were made at ground level, with a meter on a very long handle. In a sense, therefore, they were theoretical rather than practical for, as Dr David Smith explained in his testimony, a field so measured would be described as 'unperturbed' - that is, it has no objects within it. As soon as an object is placed within an electric field, the field behaves rather like a curtain and drapes itself in close folds over the object, leaving a clear space beneath. The field so folded can reach values up to a hundred times that of the ambient, unperturbed field. In ordinary working or living conditions, such an object might be a car whose top is at head level for the person standing next to it, a gate or a piece of equipment similarly placed at the level of the heart, a child's climbing frame, or a pram with a baby inside. The possible biological implications of such field enhancement are considerable. Although Innsworth lost this Public Inquiry, in the sense that the power-lines were up-rated and moved closer to the houses and the school, and also in the sense that it developed into a battlefield of personal harassment quite unexpected by the protesters, it proved an important stepping-stone for other reasons. The most important by far was the personal and intellectual aid offered by Dr David Smith; but we also received many letters of corroboration and support from other people in similar situations who, like ourselves, could not imagine what was happening to them. Some additional interesting points emerged. In the spring of 1978, six months before the Inquiry, at least four people in Fishpond had experienced strange and distressing blackouts within the space of one week - one of these people was a visitor who blacked out while riding his bike under the lines, fell off and broke his ribs. Another was my fourteen-year-old son, who had never experienced anything like it before, and indeed did not tell me until we discovered that we had all suffered in the same way but without telling each other at first because it seemed so weird. For another villager it was a series of spells of dizziness. For myself, it was an almost indescribable episode in which the light seemed to go black (although I could still see) and I was completely disoriented; even though I was in my own garden, I could not tell which way the house was, nor even which way was up or down. This, of course, occasioned much jocularity amongst the opposition when I described it at Innsworth; but later in the Inquiry we learned, from an engineer, who had not been present on the day I testified and obviously had not read my statement, that it was at that time that the lower 275 kV circuit at Fishpond had been up-rated to 345 kV - without anyone being told (Best, 198 1). The Innsworth Inquiry, which did not include a single independent medical assessor, ended in December 1978, with no decision made by the two Inspectors (one each from the Departments of Energy and the Environment) for two years, and even it was both equivocal and too late - the HV lines had already been moved closer to Innsworth. The Inspector's report on the Innsworth Inquiry contains a number of errors; for example, in Section 25.51 it is implied that only three villagers besides myself had sent letters reporting effects, whereas in fact a letter was signed and presented by 20 villagers attesting various complaints. In Section 25.52, the Inspectors state that I denied my medical history to them, whereas I told the CEGB Medical Officer, Dr Bonnell, through the Innsworth lawyer that they were welcome to see my medical records so long as they requested them also from everyone else who complained. It was late in 1978 that a judgment was reached on the New York State Public Service commission hearing. Despite the divisive and occasionally even libelous nature of the proceedings, the final New York ruling ordered the electrical utilities to leave a 350-yard corridor around the lines, and to contribute $5 million toward an independent research project, subsequently entitled the New York State Power Lines Project, on ELF electromagnetic bio-effects (Marino and Ray, 1986). Although Becker and Marino's early findings concerning lowered growth rates, lowered fertility and reduced life expectancy were hotly contested, independent research appears to be confirming them; by September 1986, at a Toronto conference on 'Health Effects of ELF Fields: Research and Communications Regulation', Dr Richard Phillips, who used to head research in that area at the Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories in Richland, Washington State, confirmed that such fields appear to be biologically active - and when asked from the floor if he would choose to live even along the right of way of HV power-lines never mind under them, agreed with Dr Marino that he would not (Microwave News, September/ October, 1986, p. 9). In 1983, a Swedish study found fewer normal pregnancies among the families of HV switchyard workers on account of more congenital malformations (Nordstrom et al., 1983); Dr Jose Delgado, working in Madrid, observed malformed and aborted chicks from eggs which had been exposed to ELF radiation (Delgado et al., 1982) - as did farmers in New York State, who reported in a 1984 Channel 4 Central TV documentary, The Good, the Bad and the Indefensible, that their hens living underneath 765 kV power-lines laid, as it were, 'scrambled' eggs. Other elements, too, were beginning to enter the debate. Quite independently of the scientific controversy, a general practitioner in Staffordshire, Dr Stephen Perry, had begun to notice unusually high levels of depressive illness and even suicide among those of his patients who lived near high-voltage lines. Like the Fishpond discovery and others corroborating it, this observation was completely spontaneous, made without any prior knowledge of possible effects. Most unusually for an ordinary GP, Dr Perry's group practice gave its members a regular six-months sabbatical every few years and he used his to complete a study of these findings. What was more unusual was that his results appeared for the first time to implicate the magnetic component of the power-line electromagnetic fields (Perry et al., 1981). This is so low - lower by far than the Earth's own extremely low magnetic field -that it had been mutually agreed at the Innsworth Inquiry to be negligible. However, Dr Perry's study was one of the first to suggest that the importance of the magnetic field lies not only in high-power strengths but also in extremely low-power alternating fields with frequencies which resonate with, and reinforce, biological wavelengths. The reason why his patients living near the invisible underground HV lines suffered the same distressing depressive and suicidal effects as those living near visible overhead lines, of which one cannot fail to be aware, has to be a question of the basic physics of magnetic fields. However, Dr Perry's study was perhaps the first to suggest that magnetic field bio-effects depend not only on the strength of the field but also on its frequency if, as in the case of that generated by the majority of the power-lines in the UK, it is alternating. Once again, as with the electric field, it is a matter of biological frequencies. And, quite apart from the tragic aspect of Dr Perry's findings, which were by their nature retrospective but are still being corroborated by personal reports I have received, his study is of great importance in doing away with the quasi-intellectual superstition which often attributes hysterical self-suggestion to electropollution sufferers; for it shows quite clearly that depressive illness and suicide were found to be statistically increased just as much among patients living near invisible, underground HV lines, of which they were unaware, as among patients living near overhead lines. His findings, and subsequent related work by Dr Cyril Smith (Smith and Baker, 1982), seem relevant also to the earlier and more generally accepted studies on bees and homing pigeons, both of which are known to have receptors which are able to sense the Earth's magnetic field and its variations, which they use to help direct their survival behavior. My own extraordinary first experience of complete disorientation below the lines may also be relevant; I had never experienced this before, though I have done so since, most notably after I had held up a fluorescent tube for over an hour, to be photographed under the lines; the next day, after a distressingly sleepless night, I found what looked like a burn on that shoulder. Meanwhile, other oddities had begun to manifest themselves, perhaps unremarkable on their own but, in such a small community as Fishpond, worthy of note. One child born in the village had already suffered a rash which amazed the specialists; another, who had often been left out in her pram under the lines crossing her grandparents' garden (before we began to research our suspicions), developed severe rashes and later a mild epilepsy. Another older child, who had always lived in Fishpond, developed a similar form of epilepsy. In the end, I myself developed a more severe form of epilepsy triggered by flickering light, which resulted in a serious car accident and a partial loss of sight. Already in the letters we had received after the Innsworth Inquiry there had been an account of seizures, especially when the weather was wet or misty. Our headaches and rashes were further intensified in patterns which did not necessarily appear to depend on the weather; for instance, two years running, at roughly the same time in May, I developed severe skin rash, swelling of the face and inflammation of the eyes, which I did not at first connect with the powerlines - nor did I connect with them a newly-developed allergy to cow's milk and cheese. Yet it now seems more than likely that both were triggered by the electromagnetic field - if not directly, then synergistically, interacting with some other feature, possibly chemical (pesticide or herbicide) sprays, possibly the local water which was all well-water, possibly chemicals getting into the wells. (Not until 1982 did most of the houses receive mains water, and then by no means all.) This latter form of interaction may well be the cause of a striking development in Innsworth since the lines there were moved close to the houses; in the row of houses a few yards from the 400 kV lines at least seven people have now developed thyroid trouble. One of these sufferers, Mrs. Stella Ross (who, despite severe and painful eye problems associated with her thyroid imbalance, has long been Innsworth's most dedicated campaigner), wrote to Dr Becker early in 1984; he replied that he had noted thyroid disturbances of various types in people exposed to HV powerlines in the United States. It should be noted that Innsworth is the home of an airfield with all the accompanying radar and communications equipment; thus it may well be an example of yet another synergistic interaction suggested by Dr Becker in a letter to the New York State Journal of Medicine (Becker, 1977). (For further discussion of the effects of radar, see Chapter 10.) By the mid-1970s it was already becoming apparent to many that microwave radiation can be biologically harmful; Dr Milton Zaret was demonstrating clearly (despite the now customary hostility from the authorities and industry) that tumors and unusual subcapsular cataracts of the eye can be caused by indiscriminate microwave exposure from radar and telecommunications equipment or leaky microwave ovens (Zaret, 1977). In England a prankster who shinned up a communications tower was blandly informed by the authorities that he had probably been rendered permanently sterile; they later admitted that this truth had been let out to discourage others. He might have been worse than sterile as far as possible future offspring might be concerned, because, as mentioned, Dr Jose Delgado in Madrid had found that exposure of hen's eggs to microwaves caused aborted or grossly malformed chicks just as did exposure to ELF fields (McAuliffe, 1985). We should remember, too, the microwave irradiation of the US Embassy in Moscow (see Chapter 10), as a result of which several diplomats developed leukemia; two of the US Ambassadors serving during the period (1953-77) died of cancer and the third, Walter Stoessel, died in December 1986 of leukemia, which was first discovered in 1975 when he was taken ill with nausea and bleeding from the eyes (Obituary, The Times, 12 December 1986). Becker's postulation of synergistic effects concerned both microwaves and ELF irradiation in an area of New York State where the hilly terrain combined and concentrated these different radiations in clearly defined patterns, within which an unusually high incidence of cancer, especially blood cancers, was also revealed (Becker, 1977). It seems that we, too, discovered at least one person suffering from this combined effect - a farmer in Wiltshire whose land is crossed by HV lines and who wrote to us in 1978 describing his crippling headaches which vanished whenever he left home (in fact it was his doctor who had suggested that he should write to us). When we visited him, we found that his land was surrounded also by military microwave and radar installations. He subsequently developed cancer of the ear. An interesting connection may be made: an article (Science News, 1984) (Swicord and Davis, 1983) entitled 'DNA helix found to oscillate in resonance with microwaves' elicited a letter from a private nurse for cancer patients in California who was struck by how many of her patients lived near HV power-lines. As for ocular effects, at least one Fishpond and one Innsworth resident have been diagnosed by consultant ophthalmologists as having damaged retinas which show unusual signs, almost as if they have been burned. Another Fishpond resident has now developed a rare cancer of the eye so serious that the eye has had to be removed. The possibilities of synergistic effects are countless. It has even been suggested that so-called lines of geopathic stress may contribute synergistically - and there is said to be a major ley-line running through Fishpond. Dr Michael Ash, who practices various forms of alternative medicine at his clinic in Cornwall, has measured electromagnetic activity from even minor earth faults; the faults underlying Fishpond, which he studied in 1979, display considerable activity which, of course, varies constantly. Innsworth, like Fishpond, is full of springs and streams - indeed, Innsworth's pylons now stand in permanently waterlogged land. In the fight of what has been discussed in Chapters 6 and 7, the apparent ability of water to 'remember' frequencies to which it has been exposed may enhance the straightforward electromagnetic effects of environmental sources of highly coherent frequencies. It is by now more than clear that this newly-emerging knowledge is not only vitally important, but also greatly under-researched or even suppressed. After the Innsworth Inquiry, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) was approached by representatives from Japan (the CEGB had refused to talk to them); the HSE Inspector, who had by then visited Fishpond, referred them to us because, as he said, we had far more and far more up-to-date material on this subject than he had. Another group from Japan asked the Economist Intelligence Unit to prepare a report on the subject; they in turn referred to us for all our material. We received other inquiries, too, from Australia, Canada, Scotland and Ireland, and in fact testified at a Public Inquiry in Haddington in south-east Scotland (the Torness Inquiry) in April 1982, on behalf of the farmers and villagers (Best, 1982). Dr David Melville, then at the University of Southampton (now a professor at the Lancashire Polytechnic in Preston), testified at this Inquiry on the results of his work on low-level pulsed magnetic fields, which affect the permeability of cell membranes (Braganza et al., 1983); he also read out a statement by Professor Bernard Watson, who is researching brain effects from variously modulated electromagnetic fields at the Department of Medical Electronics at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. Professor Watson quoted the work of Wever (1973) and others in warning against the disturbance of the body's circadian rhythms by ELF fields - the same effects as jet-lag, for instance, except that in the ELF environment these effects would be constant and therefore cumulative. One of the many protesters at the Torness Inquiry was the Abbot of Nunraw who was deeply concerned about the effects of the proposed 400 kV lines on his enclosed order of monks and the monastery farm. By our greatest piece of good fortune since the Innsworth Inquiry, we now had Dr Cyril Smith working on the subject. I had seen him on a BBC Television program - together with Dr Robert Becker and others - considering the question of the limits of ELF radiation applied externally for healing purposes. We wrote to him in 1979, but he was fully occupied at the time, although very interested; two years later, however, he asked for an account of our experiences in order to launch a graduate student on a research project. His work has since proved to be the most relevant and revealing of all. The night before the Abbot was to present his objections to the Inquiry, Dr Smith telephoned us some details of a letter he had just had accepted for publication, on the effects of low-level magnetic fields on the DNA of Escherichia coli, the most common bacteria within the digestive system. As the monastery farm would be over-wintering the cattle in barns directly below the proposed fines, where a silage pit would also be fermenting, and in view of the restricted sources of the diet of the Cistercian monks, this evidence was of paramount importance to the Abbot. The decision of the Reporter in charge of this Inquiry was the first really enlightened move on the part of any of the authorities in the UK - the HV lines were not to be erected near houses, schools or factories until further research proved them to be biologically harmless. Meanwhile, further studies were showing up ELF effects and we gathered these in. It is precisely because they work at such a subtle level of biological information and instruction that ELF effects take so long to reveal themselves cumulatively; but within the last few years studies carried out in the United States, for example by Wertheimer and Leeper (1982), have shown an increase in cancer, especially leukemia, among people whose early childhood had been spent close to HV lines. A report from Sweden in 1982 confirmed Wertheimer and Leeper's findings relating the incidence of tumors in children living near 200 kV lines to the strength of the magnetic fields (Tomenius, 1982). Also in 1982, the New England journal of Medicine (Milham, 1982) published a statistical study carried out by the State of Washington on workers subjected to ELF electromagnetic fields which showed a significantly higher than average incidence of acute myeloid leukemia; the Lancet published similar findings in a study of workers in Los Angeles (Wright et al., 1982). A third- similar result, this time from the UK, was published in the Lancet (McDowall, 1983) with comment in the Editorial. And yet another UK study (Coleman et al., 1983) found similar results in the incidence of leukemia among men in ten electrical occupations in south-east England. Later in that year, Dr Ross Adey, a biophysicist at the Loma Linda Hospital in California who had formerly worked for the US Navy and whose work is in the forefront of research on ELF electromagnetic effects on the brain and the nervous system, particularly the binding of calcium to cell walls and the production of enzymes and hormones, presented a report to the Montana Department of National Resources and Conservation (Adey and Sheppard, 1983). When questioned by our correspondents from Ireland, whose electrical authority were misrepresenting (by omission) his conclusions, Adey, who is now an adviser to the White House on EMR, replied: 'From the available data, fields of 1 kV/m at powerline frequencies appear to be safe. However, I cannot emphasize too' strongly that it is not now, nor may it ever be possible to determine that this or any other specific field level 'have no adverse effects'. The reasons relate to interactions between competing low-level environmental factors. This problem has been admirably addressed in the BIER III Report on effects of ionizing radiation. You may wish to consult a paper by the statistician Hoteling on this aspect of the BIER III Report which appeared in Science (I believe around 1970). (Adey to Dr E. Hickey, Thomond College of Education, Limerick, 19 September 1985)' Such a time-lapse in obtaining accurate information illustrates all too poignantly the extreme difficulties which the ordinary public has experienced in trying to discover anything at all about this area of environmental pollution, which yet concerns them most closely. A similar example concerns the biophysicist, Dr Louise Young, whose article in the Sierra Club Bulletin had given us our first hint that responsible scientists were seriously concerned. We held our original meeting with the CEGB in July 1976. What we did not know, and were not told (perhaps, shamefully, no one knew), was that in January of that year Louise Young had taken part extensively in a hearing held by the University of Mississippi on the management of rights of way under HV lines. Unfortunately, the same lack of information (it cannot always be called obfuscation, since these questions are so relatively new and profoundly radical) has dogged attempts to research into the other fields of radiation effects already mentioned. None the less, if country housewives and farmers can amass enough material on such a radically new subject to be consulted by people from many countries, including the Japanese government, surely it is time the official authorities informed themselves better than they have so far done - at the very least without insulting those possibly at risk with willful irrelevancies or sins of omission. Although the discovery of ELF electromagnetic bio-effects, has been so extraordinarily exciting, both intellectually and now medically in the work of Dr Cyril Smith and Dr Jean Monro, the personal and social tragedies which might have been avoided had greater concern been shown sooner by authorities are irreversible: heart attacks, nervous disorders, epilepsies, suicides, deformed or stillborn children, lowered fertility -together with all the stigmas attached to so-called 'non-specific' symptoms such as headaches, sleeplessness, exhaustion and, of course, the additional anxiety of being trapped in a living or working environment which is increasingly felt to be hostile. Those who have campaigned on behalf of everyone else have had unwelcome publicity forced on them, as well as the more helpful kind which has elicited genuine interest and support. Of course, there have been some lighter moments, as when, at the Innsworth Inquiry, a very deaf farmer utterly silenced the barrister who was cross-examining him by describing in a booming voice how his cows preferred to gather around the pylons in his field instead, as he put it, of 'getting on with the job' - i.e. grazing which, although he did not know it, confirmed completely Dr David Smith's testimony on field enhancement and Dr Cyril Smith's ideas of electrical stimulation of endogenous opiates giving rise to what he humorously called 'junkie cows' (Smith and Aarholt, 1982). It is, moreover, interesting to note that, as time has passed, our ideas, which were generally met with either a kind smile or a lifted eyebrow thirteen years ago, now tend to be received with, 'Well, it's sort of obvious, isn't it...'. The following remains true to this day: 'When a thing was new people said, "It is not true". Later, when its truth became obvious, people said, "Anyway, it is not important". And when its importance could not be denied, people said "Anyway, it is not new"' (Michel de Montaigne, 1533-92). There is considerable truth and some solace in these thoughts; but against them must be placed the fact that it is, and always has been, ordinary people, electrical workers, the residents of Fishpond and many other places, who are dying off first, uninformed and often in great distress. I have drawn a diagram (Figure 8. 1) to show what the residents of Fishpond have suffered over the years. I still receive letters or reports of suicides, heart trouble and cancers and other ailments from people like myself and my Fishpond neighbors, which could surely have been treated preventively and at the very least alleviated if the necessary research had been encouraged - and its conclusions accepted. Yet, at long last it seems that the tide may possibly be turning in favor of the general public. The Christmas 1985 issue of 'Picture Week' (Time-Life, 1985) showed a startling photograph of fluorescent light tubes glowing brightly as they were being held under 345 kV lines that had been erected two years earlier by Houston Lighting and Power, and which cross the Klein Independent School District near Houston, Texas - 99 acres of land containing an elementary, an intermediate and a high school. The School District sued Houston Lighting and Power on the grounds of increased risk of cancer due to the HV lines, especially in children. Two things mark this case as a tremendous step forward. First, the jury took only two and a half hours of deliberation before awarding $25.1 million in damages against the power company - the first such award made against a power company anywhere; and second, one of the leading cancer specialists in the US, Dr Harvey Busch, chief oncologist at the Baylor School of Medicine in Texas, together with another cancer specialist, Dr Jerry Phillips, testified on behalf of the School District, supporting their claims. Houston Lighting and Power had produced as their chief witness only an electrical engineer. It is interesting, by way of comparison, that at the various Inquiries in England the CEGB, from the start, field only their own Medical Officer, Dr John Bonnell - a physician, but one who, resolutely refusing to accept the growing evidence, preferred to interpret my medical conditions in terms only of previous medical history and psychological factors, and even wrote a letter to Mrs. Stella Ross of Innsworth assuring her categorically that there were no harmful effects at all from the electromagnetic fields produced by HV lines. Dr Bonnell retired in September 1986.
Click image to see big picture! Approximately 30 people in permanent residence: 23 reported 'non-specific' effects or presented clinical illness, or both, by 1987. Effects by house (numbers equal houses on map):
The jury's decision in the Klein Independent School District case was appealed by Houston Lighting and Power in November 1986. No new evidence is allowed in the US appellate court; all the testimony originally offered must be reconsidered by three judges unfamiliar with the case and the evidence. As this whole subject is radically new and has received little coverage, it is to be presumed that the original jury were unfamiliar with it, yet they took their decision with authoritative speed. Significantly, while the appeal was being heard the Texas Supreme Court refused to allow HL&P to energize the power line, reversing a previous court decision. In April 1987 HL&P applied for and was granted permission by the Texas Public Utilities Commission to re-route the lines at an approximate cost of $4.2 million (MWN, May/June 1987, p. 3). Such a victory will be music to many ears, besides providing a legal precedent for those engaged in, or thinking of engaging in, further battles over powerlines anywhere in the world. Although the punitive damages were overturned, the appeal judge upheld the original health hazard decision. In May 1986, five months after the case was first decided, an editorial in Science took it as an example of the difficulties of deciding whether or not the bio-effects of ELF electromagnetic fields are indeed harmless, and whether the US government should have cut back its research support as it has done. The editor pointed out that research can never demonstrate that a risk does not exist. Is that why the authorities are cutting back on research funding - because it may never be possible to prove their point to all the people whose health and well-being should really be their first concern? From our own accumulated experience, now so heartrendingly being backed up by increasingly widespread commitment on the part of the medical profession, we know that it is not simply a question of money for research, necessary as that is; it is a matter far greater and far graver than that, but with a tremendous potential for entirely new knowledge, and for the enlightened application of that knowledge. Further accounts and details concerning the Innsworth Inquiry and the situation at Fishpond can also be found in Hildyard (1983) and Bacon (1986)." |
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