Concern has arisen about the health effects of AC magnetic fields, also called electromagnetic fields or EMF,
because of scientific studies that have linked a modestly increased risk of childhood cancer with elevated field
levels of this type.
These fields result from our use of AC electric power. But high magnetic fields can be avoided without abandoning
electric power. The fields that arise are often caused by household wiring errors that can be corrected, or by
grounding arrangements that can be altered without compromising our safety - all at reasonable cost.
Even the fields that emanate directly from the power company lines near a house may be remediable. Although often the
homeowner's cost for obtaining such changes may range from quite high to prohibitive, some changes may be as simple as
persuading the power company to rectify a neutral wire defect or do a better balancing of phases on their line.
In 340 densely informative but highly readable pages, the book Silencing the Fields examines all the
possibilities. Ed Leeper is the physicist co-author of several influential early scientific studies examining the link
of cancer with magnetic fields, studies done more than 20 years ago, and he has worked actively with the measurement and mitigation
of AC magnetic fields since then.
