I concluded my previous editorial by saying that the European Commission had just given its proposal for the directive on the minimum health and safety requirements regarding the exposure of workers to risks arising from physical agents (electromagnetic fields), and I promised to return to subject in the next bulletin.

My plan was to write a separate news article on the Commission’s proposal for this bulletin, but I realised it is not worth sharing information that is far from being finalised. As far as I know, the directive proposal has been discussed and is still being discussed within EU institutions. Since the matter is still being processed, it is best to patiently await the final result. I will address this subject again in the next bulletin.

Since writing the previous report, I have had the opportunity to attend some interesting conferences. The Bioelectromagnetics Society had its 33th Annual Meeting in Halifax, Canada, in June. Another interesting conference related to our theme was EMF 2011, organised by the European Commission in Brussels in November.

Quite a large number of interesting new scientific articles have been published recently, so it was easy to find some for this bulletin. The first article reports on a piece of research that examined the possibility of children developing asthma if their mothers were exposed to magnetic fields during pregnancy – a topic that has not been studied much in the past. The next two articles discuss the effects of high magnetic fields; the exposure levels are much higher than those people are normally exposed to.

The very last article on occupational exposure is rather technical. It is about a study that used calculations to estimate the exposure to electric fields in live-line work. The reason I included this article was that in some tasks it may be important to be able to find out the level of exposure to electric fields. The future employee directive will obviously specify the situations that require the measuring of exposure levels.

Hope you enjoy reading this summary in English!

While compiling this situation report, I was surprised to find so many new studies on topics I thought had already been studied quite extensively. Perhaps researchers are now more intrigued by the potential health effects related to extremely low-frequency fields than they were a few years ago.

The actual piece of news is that the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) published their new exposure guidelines in December 2010. The new guidelines have been revised to reflect the changed biological basis, as the exposure guidelines are no longer presented as current densities but as values for internal electric fields.

The bulletin also includes a brief report from the Bioelectromagnetics Society’s annual meeting in South Korea last summer. I mainly focus on presenting some papers published at the conference by the Tampere University of Technology. What I remember best about the conference was the way in which electromagnetic fields will be applied in future technologies. For example, MRI image quality can be clearly improved if the scanning is done using higher fields than today. Another interesting application is to use magnetic fields for supplying power for buses. Electromagnetic fields can be utilised in a wide range of technical innovations. It is quite easy to overlook the positive aspects related to these fields when you only focus on exploring their potential harmful health effects.

I conclude the bulletin with my own publication. It is a follow-up on my articles that discussed measurements carried out at 400 kV substations. The results were earlier examined by analysing the maximum values for electric fields, measured currents and calculated current densities. This time we investigated work tasks carried out on service platforms, studying mean values for the entire measurement period and not just the maximum values. You can read more about the results in the last section of the bulletin.

The summary of the second situation report bulletin for the year 2010 is published online in English.

Hope you enjoy reading this summary in English!

A review of the international electromagnetic exposure guidelines is underway both by the European Union and the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP). The new guidelines from the ICNIRP have not yet been published; however, in autumn 2009, the ICNIRP gave us the opportunity to have a look at their draft in advance. This time they wanted to receive feedback before announcing their final guidelines. The new element in the ICNIRP proposition is that current density values have been replaced by internal electric field values in the human body. Otherwise the proposed exposure limits seem to have remained unchanged with regard to the electric system.

Even though the new guidelines could not yet be included in this bulletin, other interesting information will be provided. We start with a couple of articles presented at the BioEM2009 conference, an annual event for researchers in the field that offers them the opportunity to check out the latest global research trends.

The last article in the bulletin is my own article. It discusses occupational exposure at 400 kV substations and power lines. I thought it might interest our readers – and, obviously, it is nice to be able to report that such an extensive study has reached a stage where it could be published at international level.

Now the summary of the second situation report bulletin (2/2009) ispublished online in English.

I hope you enjoy reading this second brief summary!