(Is this a partial cause for Rayelan's recent ailments...or your own?)

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Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 22:21:16 -0500
From: Roy Beavers <guru@emfguru.com>
Reply-To: roy@emfguru.com
Organization: EMF-L List
Subject: "A Real Shocker" (Raunio).

...........From EMF-L.........

This is a real good item to spend some time with.........guru......

-------- Original Message --------

Subject: "A Real Shocker" - (Madison Isthmus Newspaper)

Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 20:44:27 -0500

From: Darlene Raunio <darvr@newnorth.net>

To: (Recipient list suppressed)

Madison's Isthmus Newspaper
Week of May 21, 2001
"A Real Shocker"
For years, Marilyn Wilson had a disease with no cure. Doctors couldn't help her,
but an electrician did.

By Matt Olson

When Marilyn Wilson turned 40, nearly seven years ago, her friends threw her a
surprise party: It was the last time in a long time that she remembers feeling
good. Within a few years, Wilson was forced to leave her job as a social worker
with the state Department of Health and Family Services, after burning through
17 years of accumulated sick leave. Some days, she could barely pull herself out
of bed, and then, after an exhausting day; she couldn't sleep. Negotiating the
stairs of her west-side Madison home became almost unbearable. The memory alone
nearly moves her to tears. "I was dying," she says.

By her account, she visited more than 20 doctors, but none could explain what
was wrong. Her fatigue could not be attributed to a bacterial or viral
infection. Her hands were sometimes too weak to button her own clothes, but
multiple sclerosis and its neurodegenerative cousins were ruled out.

Eventually a diagnosis emerged from the fog: chronic fatigue syndrome. Now
Wilson had a name for her demon, but this brought little comfort: "How are you
supposed to feel when you are told you have a disease that has no cure?"

For Wilson, the low point came toward the end of last year: "I felt okay in
September but by November I came crashing down. I didn't go to Thanksgiving or
Christmas. I couldn't get out of bed. I was dizzy and nauseated. My memory was
fading in and out." She laughs to herself: "You know, I forgot to go to Jamaica
on vacation. That's how bad my memory was; I didn't remember I was supposed to
go until it was too late. "

Around this time, in a support group for women diagnosed with CFS, Wilson
stumbled across what she calls "the most amazing discovery of my life."
Catherine Kleiber, a Waterloo woman also diagnosed with CFS, contacted the group
with news of her own miraculous recovery It was not brought about by special
drugs or herbs, a unique diet, a special doctor or the healing power of prayer.

Rather, Kleiber turned off the power to her house. She felt better right away;
within days, her CFS symptoms disappeared. Now she keeps her house as
de-electrifled as possible, convinced that power quality was the root of her
illness - and maybe that of others like her.

After "six years of hell," Wilson was ready to try anything. She called Dave
Stetzer, an industrial electrician and consultant out of Blair, Wis., who has a
long history of working with the phenomenon of "stray electricity" on farms. On
Jan. 8 of this year, Stetzer came to Wilson's house, near Regent Street and
Speedway Road. There he measured a low-voltage, high-frequency current flowing
on her wires and throughout the house. He rigged Wilson up with a voltmeter
connected to a small amp. When she touched her sink, her dimmer switches or the
doorknob - anything conductive, the amp screamed.

"My house was full of dirty electricity " she says, "and I was completing the
circuit."

Later measurements, says Wilson, confirmed the problem. She put a voltmeter on
her counter and charted how she felt. Peaks in the measured current matched her
lowest points in the day. For the first time, Wilson could explain why she felt
worse in the early mornings, when people were getting up and turning on
appliances, and in the summer and winter, when electricity usage for air
conditioning and heat is at its peak. It was a revelation: "When I began to
overlay my life experience with my electrical experience, It all made sense."

Stetzer installed a simple electrical liter in Wilson's house and, like
Kleiber's, her condition improved almost right away "I didn't get better
overnight," she says, "but it was almost that fast."

Now Wilson, 46, says her symptoms have receded. A disease that her doctors could
not cure has undergone a remission that they cannot explain. This has made her
a true believer in an issue some dismiss as kooky and others say may be the
greatest hidden public health issue of our time.

"There's no doubt in my mind that there is a problem here," says Wilson. "and I
would like the government and the utilities to acknowledge the problem, identify
a solution, and put it into place. People shouldn't have to worry about whether
their power is safe."

Wilson's experience has sparked an almost missionary zeal. Her house invokes an
image of a student in the throes of a massive research project; books and
articles on electropathology clutter every surface. When she gets going, she
draws links between dirty power, Project ELF; and microwave riot-control
weapons. It strikes her as suspicious that Phyllis Dube, the new head of the
state Department of Health and Family Services, was formerly a utility company
lobbyist.

But just because Wilson is a bit paranoid doesn't mean she's wrong. She recently
received an award for activism from CURE (Citizens United for Responsible
Electricity), a group concerned about the human health con- sequences of
electricity And she's taken her message to the halls of power, contacting state
public health officials and politicians. She even flew to Washington, D.C., with
Stetzer and a small group of scientists for a meeting with Sen. Russ Feingold.

"We need water but we don't need water pollution," says Wilson. "We need air but
we don't need air pollution. And our society needs electricity, but it doesn't
need electrical pollution. Our electrons should stay on the lines and not go
through the earth or up into our houses."

In front of Wilson's home on Mason Street is a transformer that delivers
electricity to eight homes. She says that after Stetzer visited her home, he
told her "that I had a serious problem; and the power company would have to fix
it." Wilson asked MG&E to come out and take measurements. Within days, "huge
MG&E trucks" delivered work crews that spent two or three days working on her
block.

MG&E has a different memory of the situation. "We went out twice, and checked
the service from the transformer to the meter, and as far as we can tell, we are
within [state] guide. lines," says Steve Carlson, a spokesperson for MG&E. "We
did not change or replace any equipment." He says MG&E didn't find harmonics on
the wires leading into her house.

But Wilson says Stetzer's instruments showed that there was. She says MG&E has
provided her with only the most recent measurements, rebuffing her request for
data from before work was done.

Either way Wilson says the problem has been fixed, and she now feels safe in her
home. But still, she says, "I can't spend a lot of time in Kinko's, or anyplace
that has a lot of fluorescent lighting, or I just feel terrible."

Wilson and Stetzer believe the cause of her illness stems from a phenomenon
known to electricians and engineers as harmonics. Electricity in the U.S.
normally flows at 60 cycles per second (60 Hz) in an alternating current (AC).
But computers, TV s, fax machines, fluorescent lighting and various other
electronic devices incorporate circuitry that converts regular 120 volt AC to a
low-voltage direct cur- rent (DC). The cumulative effect of everyone turning
their appliances on and off through. out the day is to overload the power grid
with harmonic frequencies -popularly referred to as dirty power:

For industry dirty power is a real problem. Harmonics cause insulation to
deteriorate, overheat electric motors and burn out circuit boards. Karl
Stahlkopf, vice president of the Electrical Power Research Institute (EPRI),
which serves the utility industry, was quoted in the July 5, 1999 Fortune
magazine saying that dirty power costs U.S. industry $4 billion to $6 billion a
year, mostly on remediation. Other estimates double that figure.

Government and utilities do not officially recognize electricity's pathological
effects. A 1995 draft report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
recommended that electromagnetic fields be classified as a class B carcinogen,
like formaldehyde or dioxin; the report was never published in final form.
Another study by the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences
concluded there is no correlation between exposure to electromagnetic fields
and cancer, even though a working group that contributed findings to the reports
classified electromagnetic fields as "possible human carcinogens."

"Cancer clusters," high incidences of child leukemia and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma
in people who live or work near high-tension power lines, were widely
publicized in the early 19008. Separate studies by epidemiologists at University
of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the University of Ontario found that line
workers at electric utilities were twice as likely as other utility workers to
commit suicide. Other studies suggest that exposure to electromagnetic fields
affects the body's ability to produce melatonin, a hormone thought to influence
emotions and sleep.

The standard line by utilities and the state Public Service Commission (PSC) is
that electromagnetic fields pose no substantial health risk. But a study
published in January 2000 by EPRI, the utility industry research center, finds
that low-Ievel contact current "may explain the reported associations of
residential magnetic fields with childhood leukemia." This study drew the first
link between EMFs and contact currents, popularly known as "stray voltage."

Last year, The La Crosse Tribune published an award-winning series by reporter
Chris Hardie documenting the effects of stray voltage on cows. (For the series
and more, see www.strayvoltage.org.) Farmers across the state have seen the
productivity of their herds plummet. Their cattle twitch, moan, pick their feet
up constantly and fail to produce milk. And they die, rotting by the ton.

The PSC acknowledges the existence of stray voltage, but defines it as "a
natural phenomenon that can be found between two con- tact points in any animal
confinement area where electricity is grounded." This gives the utilities an out
in two ways. First, it allows them to blame the farmer for not properly
grounding his or her "confinement area." Second, it absolves the utilities of
responsibility for phenomena outside the confinement area.

And it is current originating outside the confinement area that is the problem.
When the power grid's neutral wires - which return electrical current in the
form of electrons to the generating station and complete the circuit - become
overloaded with harmonic frequencies, the ability of the wire to carry the
current decreases. But the current has to go somewhere, so it goes into the
earth through a ground plug.

And that overloading, combined with the spillover, is why harmonics can affect a
city dweller like Wilson.

"Think about it like a sewage system," explains Stetzer. "If you take a
four-inch sewer main, and triple the number of houses that are using it, you're
going to see it back up. It's the same with current, except instead of expanding
the size of the main, what we've done is poke holes in it and let the sewage
flow out all over the ground. That's basically what we've done with electricity
in this state, and you can measure it."

Once the current is in the earth, it makes its way back to the generating
station via the path of least resistance. This could be a creek bed, a railroad
track, a water main, or whatever other low-impedance pathway exists.

The voltages traveling along the ground are characteristically low, but the
frequencies are not. Stetzer, who with various acad- emics has made a full-time
hobby out of chasing down the sources of power quality problems, has measured
frequencies in the radio to microwave range - frequencies that have a definite
and measurable biological effect from the cellular level up.

And it's an interesting coincidence that the classic symptoms of CFS - fatigue,
insomnia, muscle and joint pain, headaches and tender or swollen lymph nodes -
are almost exactly the same as the symptoms listed by people who are exposed to
radio or microwave frequency radiation in a controlled setting.

But the state doesn't buy it. For the record, the PSC doesn't believe ground
currents are a problem, doesn't think electricity has any ill effects on human
health, and doesn't bother looking at any frequency outside of 60 hertz -
standard current.

AlI of the orders in effect for stray voltage investigations refer to the 60 Hz
fundamental voltage or current and not to any harmonic content which mayor may
not be pre- sent in addition to the fundamental frequency," says Mark Cook, the
PSC's stray voltage program manager.

The PSC even denies what many farmers say has been established beyond a
reasonable doubt - that ground currents make farm animals sick. Cook quotes a
study by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission that "no credible scientific
evidence supports the claim that currents in the earth or associated electrical
parameters such as voltages, magnetic fields and electric fields, are causes of
poor health and milk production in dairy herds." (One of the engineers who
worked on the study, Alex Furo of Ontario, Canada, resigned from the panel,
later telling the Wisconsin Agriculturist that he perceived "an increasing
tendency of the [panel] to align itself with the vested interests in the power
industry")

As for possible human health effects, says Cook, "the PSC must rely on the
expertise of other government agencies regarding health questions, because we
do not have in-house professionals to research these subjects." And, according
to Cook, the Department of Health and Family Services "has not reported any
concerns about either elevated or low-level, high-frequency transients,
power-quality events, harmonics, ground currents or earth currents having an
adverse effect on human health."

Dr. Henry Anderson, the chief medical officer for occupational and environmental
health at the state Division of Public Health, has said "scientific research on
the human health risks associated with exposure to electrical currents is at
best inconclusive." This opinion was offered in response to an inquiry from
state Rep. Barbara Gronemus, whose rural district near Eau Claire includes many
farmers who have grappled with the stray voltage issue.

But Gronemus, in a letter to Anderson, says, "There is a vast body of literature
concerning the adverse effects of electricity on human health. I encourage you
to explore it rigorously."

Gronemus is vexed by how adamantly the bureaucracy and utilities insist there
is no problem. "They all know better; this has been going on for years," she
says. "They say it doesn't exist, but if that's the case, why was there
language in the budget saying that you couldn't sue the utilities over stray
voltage? Something's rotten." (Gov. Scott McCallum's budget initially contained
a provision that would have shielded utilities from liability in stray voltage
lawsuits, but this was withdrawn after farmers objected.) Gronemus working on
legislation of her own to deal with this issue, but declines to comment on it
until the drafting is complete.

As Gronemus intimates, the literature on the health effects of electromagnetic
fields is in fact extensive. Even a casual survey turns up more than 1,000
journal articles, and Stetzer claims to have nearly five times that many in his
office. But by and large, that literature doesn't show a causal relationship
between electromagnetic fields and disease, just a correlational one. The kind
of double-blind, peer-reviewed human clinical studies needed to establish
mainstream credibility simply have not been done.

What's more, most research focuses on electromagnetic fields (EMFs), rather than
contact currents. They are distinct phenomena, but "people frequently don't
make the distinction between them," says John Lorenz of the state Division of
Public Health. "We are presented with reports of people measuring current and
citing EMF literature to document potential health effects."

Lorenz acknowledges that ground currents entering a house - through plumbing,
for instance - could be a potential mechanism of exposure, although he thinks
this "is unlikely to result in a significant current flow through the individual
that would approach the strength of the currents naturally occurring within the
body."

Besides, he says, "all of us are exposed to either EMFs or electrical currents
at low levels, the same way we are exposed to low levels of toxic chemicals in
our food, water and air. We also know that at some intensity both EMFs and
currents passing through the body present a risk of detrimental health effects.
The critical questions are, 'At what levels is there a risk?' and 'Are people
being exposed to those levels?'" And at this point, says Lorenz, the scientific
evidence is "inconclusive."

While most of the attention garnered by dirty power and harmonics has focused on
farms, the problem is not limited to the coun- tryside. "This is not a rural
issue," says Rep. Gronemus. "This an issue that crosses town and city
boundaries, and we all should be aware of it and want it resolved."

Stetzer, in fact, feels that in the city "the problem is worse" because of the
number of houses using the grid. The density of houses, each with their own
array of gadgetry being turned on and off, overloads the grid with harmonics
much faster than in the country. It may be that cows are more susceptible to
health effects. "If you look at a cow, it has to stand in this environment,
barefoot, often in manure or urine, which are conductive, and be exposed to
these currents all the time," says Stetzer. So even though cows and humans have
the same biological resistance, "a human can move in and out of the environment,
[while] the cow has to stand there."

Also, if a cow gets sick and veterinary tests are inconclusive, farmers have
learned to look for electrical problems. The same is not true for people. If a
person gets sick and the tests are inconclusive, they get diagnosed with CFS or
something.

In most cases, says Stetzer, electrical problems that pose health hazards can be
fixed. "I like electricity, " he attests. "I like my TV, and I like good
lighting when I read, but I want the power I use to be safe."

But whose responsibility is it to make power safe? Should it be the
manufacturers of appliances? The European Union already has standards to ensure
that computer monitors and such do not pollute the power grid with harmonics. Is
it the utilities? Former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson used to joke that the
U.S. has the power grid of a Third World country. "Moving to a five-wire system
[thus increasing the capacity of the return wires] would practically eliminate
ground current problems," says Stetzer. And the utilities could upgrade their
power distribution systems to filter out harmonics. But these modifications
"would cost millions."

That cost, says Gronemus, is behind the reluctance to admit a problem. "They
are denying that we have an old, deteriorating, wornout system in place," she
says, "and they don't want to spend the money to fix it."

Stetzer thinks a one-cent-per-kilowatt surcharge could finance all necessary
upgrades. He likens it to highway repair. "A while back we had horrible roads,
so we tacked on a five-cent tax for a gallon of gas," he says. "Now we have good
roads, they're more comfortable to drive on, and they don't wear out your car
as fast."

But the state is a long way from that solution, especially given that the
utilities, the PSC and state officials for the most part do not admit there's a
problem.

Marilyn Wilson says that, aside from Rep. Gronemus, none of the state officials
she's spoken to - including Dr. Anderson, Mark Cook and a representative of
Gov. Scott McCallum's office - have taken her concerns seriously. Sen. Feingold,
after meeting with Wilson and others earlier this year, put out a press release
calling attention to the issue and promising to remain vigilant: "Numer- ous
medical studies point to a possible link between exposure to
extremely-low-frequency electromagnetic fields and a variety of human health
effects and abnormalities in both animal and plant species."

Feingold's response heartens Wilson and others who are trying to advocate on
this issue. Unfortunately, as Feingold points out, most of the regulatory
authority to address power-quality problems resides with states. And the state
has thus far been unsympathetic.

"The bottom line is nobody is taking responsibility, " she says. "No one's
stepping up to fix this." And that frightens her: "I was sick for six years;
how many other people is this affecting who just don't know it?"

C.U.R.E. - Citizens United for Responsible Electricity

P.O. Box 43

Brantwood, WI 54513

715 - 564 - 3362 / 715 - 453 - 5575

<darvr@newnorth.net>

www.toxicelectricity.com

or view more articles at:

www.strayvoltage.org

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