Do power lines impact health? III
This topic has been in the news again recently. A headline from June 3rd 2005 claims that Researchers have found that proximity to high voltage power lines may be associated with childhood leukemia - but as previously reported in other studies -- the association remains "slight" and "the relation may be due to chance." The latest headlines are the result of a study published in the British Journal of Medicine (v 330, p 1290, 2005) that finds that children who live within 200 meters (about 600 feet) of power lines, have increased incidence of leukemia with a Margin of Error between 1.1 and 2.6 . If we accept these results at face value, they would mean that about 5 children per year, in the whole of the United Kingdom (where the study was performed) would get childhood leukemia because of their proximity to power lines. However, the researchers themselves clearly state that "the relation may be due to chance or confounding*".
*confounding - a consequence of other factors that are not related to the power lines themselves, such as population and traffic density.