Samuel Milham MD MPH - Dirty Electricity: Electrification and the Diseases of Civilization

DIRTY
ELECTRICITY

ELECTRIFICATION AND THE
DISEASES OF CIVILIZATION

SECOND EDITION

SAMUEL MILHAM, MD, MPH

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Dirty
Electricity

Electrification and the Diseases of Civilization

Second Edition

Copyright 2010, 2012 Samuel Milham, MD, MPH

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ISBN: 978-1-938908-18-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-938908-19-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012916755

iUniverse rev. date: 11/21/2012

Those who ignore history are destined to repeat it.

Edmund Burke (17291797)

All science is based on the cumulative ideas and work of others. Since much of my work as an epidemiologist is based on the vital registration system of statistics and population data, Im deeply indebted to the scores of people who filled out, collected, and tabulated the millions of United States birth, death, and census records over the last century. The 1961 paper showing the emergence of the childhood leukemia age peak in the early part of the twentieth century by Michael Court-Brown and Richard Doll, as well as a graph of the time trend of United States electrification published by Jesse Ausubel and Cesare Marchetti, and finally the identification, characterization, and measurement of dirty electricity by Martin Graham and David Stetzer, were necessary precursors to my study at the La Quinta Middle School that identified dirty electricity as a potent universal carcinogen. Without the Desert Sun newspaper article by Mike Perrault about the La Quinta teachers cancers, none of this new knowledge would have emerged.

At each stop on my fifty-year odyssey there were people who helped and supported me. At the New York State Health Department, Alan Gittlesohn rescued me from an unfulfilling public health residency and worked on a number of projects with me. In Hawaii, Bob Worth was the best boss and colleague I could have asked for. At the Washington State Health Department, much of my work was facilitated and improved by Eric Ossiander. Our childhood leukemia project was critical to everything that followed. Eric has also given me a continuing bridge to Washington State data during my twenty-year retirement.

Over the years, the late William Ross Adey, MD, was always available to answer technical questions about electromagnetic fields. Louis Slesin, Ph.D., editor of Microwave News, has for decades been an important conduit into the latest electromagnetic field (EMF) research.

Retirement meant leaving professional networks behind. With no office, students, colleagues, library, or professional meetings, most of my research efforts have, of necessity, been a solitary enterprise for the last twenty years. It has taken every bit of the last fifty years for all of the pieces of this puzzle to fall into place to reveal the amazing picture of an invisible, hidden exposure contributing to our modern diseases of civilization.

Thanks to George Nedeff of iUniverse for guidance and advice on publishing, and to B. Blake Leavitt for making this book more readable. Magda Havas produced most of the figures in the book. Sherry Milham offered valuable suggestions and proofreading.

T his book is written in an urgent attempt to warn you about what I believe to be a global man-made health threat. When Thomas Edison began wiring New York City with a direct current electricity distribution system in the 1880s, he gave us the magic of electric light, heat, and power, but inadvertently opened a Pandoras Box of unimaginable illness and death.

There is a high likelihood that most of the twentieth century diseases of civilization, including cardiovascular disease, malignant neoplasms (cancer), diabetes, and suicide, are not caused by lifestyle alone, but by certain physical aspects of electricity itself. The data to prove this has been available since 1930, but no one investigated it. Consequently, the wars on cancer and cardiovascular diseases are doomed to failure, because a critical etiologic factor has not been recognized. Whats more, these very diseases are now increasing in the population in direct proportion to our increasing exposures to high-technology electrical devices.

The electrical part of this story begins with a childhood leukemia cluster centered in Rome, New York, that I studied in the 1960s. I didnt realize that the cluster was probably caused by radar exposure until many years later when Stanislaw Szmiegelski, a researcher in Poland, reported that radar and radio-exposed military personnel had high rates of leukemia and lymphoma (Szmiegelski 1996). In the United States, the emergence of childhood leukemia in the 1930s, and the spread of the age two-through-five-year peak for the major leukemia of childhood, common acute lymphoblastic leukemia, was strongly correlated with the gradual spread of electrification from urban into rural areas (Milham & Ossiander 2001). Even today, this childhood leukemia age peak does not appear in non-electrified areas like sub-Saharan Africa.

While conducting the childhood leukemia age peak study, a few adult cancers, including female breast cancer, also showed a strong correlation with residential electrification. At that time, I could not believe that 60-Hz magnetic fields could be responsible. A few years later, a 2004 newspaper article about a cancer cluster in teachers at the La Quinta Middle School in Southern California led me to conduct another study, which showed that high frequency voltage transients (called dirty electricity by the utility industry) was a potent universal carcinogen. Dirty electricity rides along on the sixty-cycle sine wave of alternating current (AC) power as high frequency voltage transients, between two and one hundred kilohertz. It also is increasingly found in ground currents returning to utility substations. They are caused by interruptions of current flow and by arcing and sparking. Dirty electricity can be present on electrified wires anywhere and probably has been on them since the beginning of electrification. Ambient dirty electricity couples capacitively to the human body and induces electrical currents in the body.

The La Quinta paper, published in 2008 (Milham & Morgan 2008), led to another study in 2009, Historical evidence that electrification caused the twentieth century epidemic of disease of civilization(Milham 2010), which motivated the writing of this book and my warning. This book will explain how a then seventy-two-year-old retired medical epidemiologist became involved with what turned out to be the most important, interesting, heart-breaking, and difficult series of studies of my long career.