But there may be a down side to the miracle. Does using electrical appliances cause cancer? How about cell phones? What about living near power lines? After years of controversy, there is a lot of on-going research, but few answers.
For starters, there is a possible connection between cell phone emissions of radio waves and brain cancer in humans, but again, it is far from conclusive. Recent studies suggest that there may be DNA damage associated with both radio waves and microwaves. Even though there is no conclusive, smoking-gun evidence, there are so many adults who spend a significant amount of time talking into their cell phones that caution is definitely the wise attitude to take.
Then there are all those household appliance - it's amazing how many we use in the bathroom, kitchen, the garage, the laundry room, the living room. From dishwashers to VCRs to computers, we are surrounded daily by devices that use electricity. Do electric fields produced by those appliances affect our health? Electric fields, it turns out, are produced by voltage - the lamp is plugged in, but not turned on. Electric fields are easily blocked by objects in the way, and while AC currents associated with small electric motors are believed to induce small changes within cells, it's thought that these induced currents are so much smaller than the electrical currents produced by our hearts and brains that their effects, if any, are unnoticeable. Not all AC fields we produce are weak, though - standing beneath transmission lines can actually cause a person's hair to vibrate, producing a kind of tingling. Those electric fields certainly might affect us. Some researchers point to changes in melatonin production, which lowers our resistance to tumor growth, and to alterations of the immune system, changes in brain activity and in heart rate - but because the effects are so small and haven't been successfully duplicated in other studies, the jury is still out.
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