Overview of and Rationale for the Conclusions of the California Emf Risk Evaluation 1 Who Did the Evaluation and What Form Did

On behalf of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), three scientists who 1 work for the California Department of Health Services (DHS) were asked to review 2 the studies about possible health problems from electric and magnetic fields (EMFs) 3 from power lines, wiring in buildings, some jobs, and appliances. The CPUC request 4 for review did not include radio frequency EMFs from cell phones and radio towers. 5 Reviewer 1, Vincent Delpizzo, Ph.D., is a physicist and epidemiologist; Reviewer 2, 6 Raymond Richard Neutra, M.D., Dr.P.H., is a physician epidemiologist; and 7 Reviewer 3, Geraldine Lee, Ph.D., is an epidemiologist with training in genetics. All 8 three have published original research in the EMF area and have followed the field 9 for many years. To integrate and extend their body of knowledge, the EMF Program 10 contracted with specialists in biophysics, statistics, and animal experimentation to 11 prepare a background in critical literature review in their respective fields and to 12 make sure that the literature review was up to date through June 2000 (P. Gailey, 13 Ph.D., G. Sherman, Ph.D., W. Rogers, Ph.D., and A. Martin, Ph.D.). The first three 14 were involved with the writing of the 1998 National Institutes of Environmental 15 Health Sciences (NIEHS) report. Furthermore, for each chapter of the review, 16 another DHS epidemiologist or toxicologist was asked to read the original literature 17 and consulted extensively with whichever of the three core reviewers was writing 18 that chapter. This ensured that the writer based his/her evaluation on an 19 understanding of the evidence that was as objective and consistent as possible. All 20 three reviewers worked for the EMF program for at least five years and to some 21 extent they influenced each other’s thinking through their constant interaction and 22 the review of each other’s chapters. All three did their reviews according to the Risk 23 Evaluation Guidelines (REG) that had been developed earlier and approved by the 24 program’s Science Advisory Panel (SAP). The Guidelines specified that the 25 conclusions about any hazard should be done using two systems. The first was 26 developed by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and has 27 been used by the NIEHS. It rates an agent as a Definite, Probable, Possible 28 carcinogen or Not a carcinogen, or specifies that the evidence is “Inadequate” to 29 rate the agent. In addition, the California Guidelines specified that in order to 30 accommodate the probability-based computer models of the program’s policy 31 projects each of the DHS reviewers would individually assign a number between 0 32 and 100 to denote their degree of certainty that epidemiological associations 33 between EMFs and certain diseases indicated that EMFs increased the risk of those 34 diseases to some degree. They indicated their best judgement graphically with a 35 little "x" and placed a shaded bar on either side of that "x" to indicate how uncertain 36 they were. The best judgement and the uncertainty ranges could be used in 37 quantitative policy analysis. The Guidelines, which were modified with advice from 38 public comment and the SAP and the DHS reviewers, attached pre-agreed-upon 39 English language phrases to various ranges of this degree of certainty. These are 40 presented below in Table I. 41