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The Body Electric
Arthur Frank, then at New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine,
suggested that VDT users lose so much time due to eye problems and
neck pain that the effects may become a major drain on the economy by
the end of the decade.
Some of the complaints undoubtedly arise from postural strains and
lighting defects in the notoriously ill-designed work areas where many
VDTs are used. They could be prevented by more frequent breaks and
some sympathetic attention to human engineering. The birth defects
and cataracts probably won't disappear so easily, however. Certainly
pregnant women should be allowed temporary reassignment without loss
of pay, a right already accepted in much of Western Europe and recently
put into law in Ontario. That won't protect sperm cells and unfertilized
eggs, however. Regular maintenance and a lead-impregnated glass or
acrylic screen (such as is used in nuclear power plant windows) can vir-
tually eliminate ionizing radiation, but screen-generated microwaves re-
quire a transparent shield that still conducts electrical energy—a
product that doesn't yet exist. Some frequencies of EMR are easy to
block simply by using metal cabinets instead of the cheaper plastic ones,
but VLF and ELF waves require grounded shielding. All these preven-
tive measures are expenses that most manufacturers and managers have
been loath to accept; until they do, workers will be paying the entire
price.
The dangers of electropollution are real and well documented. It
changes, often pathologically, every biological system. What we don't
know is exactly how serious these changes are, for how many people. The
longer we, as a society, put off a search for that knowledge, the greater
the damage is likely to be and the harder it will be to correct. Mean-
while, one of the few honest statements to emerge from the Nixon
administration, a warning issued by the President's Office of Telecom-
munications Policy in 1971, continues to bleed through the whitewash:
"The population at risk is not really known; it may be special groups; it
may well be the entire population. . . . The consequences of undervalu-
ing or misjudging the biological effects of long-term, low-level exposure
could become a critical problem for the public health, especially if ge-
netic effects are involved."
Conflicting Standards
The establishment Attitude toward EMR's health effects derives largely
from the work of Herman Schwan. An engineer who had been a pro-