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PROGRAMME INFO |
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Costing the Earth tells stories which touch all our lives, looking at man's effect on the environment and at how the environment reacts. It questions accepted truths, challenges the people in charge and reports on progress towards improving the world we live in. |
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LISTEN AGAIN 30 min |
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PRESENTER |
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'I really enjoy working on Costing the Earth, because it has the time to get its teeth into a subject and the resources to look at it critically. I hope it manages to say something new about most of the subjects it covers.'
Alex Kirby
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Current Concerns
For many years there has been great concern about the possible health effects of electric and magnetic fields. People living beneath high voltage power-lines have attributed a variety of illnesses from depression to leukaemia to the effects of these fields. But until now scientists have found it difficult to prove a link.
A recently completed study asked 1063 pregnant Californian women to wear a meter around their waists that measured magnetic field levels every 10 seconds. Women exposed to sudden high peak levels of magnetic field were found to be at double the risk of miscarriage. Perhaps more worryingly, those peak levels could potentially come from hair dryers, microwave ovens, vacuum cleaners and a host of other household goods. Dr De-Kun Li’s findings certainly need to be replicated in similar experiments before health warnings are printed on every hair dryer. But, in the meantime, he suggests that it would be prudent for pregnant women to hand over the hoovering to their husbands and stand well back from the microwave as it cooks their dinner.
In this week’s Costing the Earth, Alex Kirby travels to California to chart the growing evidence of the harmful effects of magnetic fields and to find out the reaction of the electricity industry to the new findings.
Next week Tom Feilden asks how Britain's conservationists are reacting to global warming.
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RELATED LINKS
National Radiological Protection Board
Power Watch
Electricity Association
Human Radiation Effects Group
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