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.
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