The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET, formerly the Institution of Electrical Engineering, IEE) maintains a Policy Advisory Group on possible biological effects of EMFs. The Group issued a FactFile in 2001. In a section entitled “Should I be worried?”, this concluded for power frequencies:
“It will, unfortunately, never be possible to say with certainty that fields are safe. Science can never prove that anything is totally safe. Quite properly, on a sensitive public-health issue, research continues. However, there is a broad consensus among the many national and international bodies that have reviewed the evidence (including the IEE): the balance of the evidence is against the fields encountered by the public being a cause of cancer or any other disease.”
They also issue position statements roughly every two years. The most recent, in 2010, concludes:
“BEPAG has concluded that the balance of scientific evidence to date does not indicate that harmful effects occur in humans due to low-level exposure to EMFs. This conclusion remains the same as that reached in its previous position statements, the last being in May 2008, and our findings have not been substantially altered by the peer-reviewed literature published in the past two years.
At power frequencies (50 or 60 Hz), the balance of evidence from the large body of scientific papers built up over several decades suggests that the existence of harmful health effects from environmental levels of exposure has not been substantiated but remains a possibility. No generally accepted experimental demonstration of any biological effect, harmful or otherwise, due to such fields has been established. Pooled analyses of epidemiological studies show an association between childhood leukaemia and higher levels (greater than about 0.4 microteslas) of power-frequency magnetic fields in the home. However, in the absence of convincing mechanistic and experimental evidence, these epidemiological findings do not provide good grounds for concluding that there is a causal relationship. Problems of study design and selection bias problems remain a possible explanation of these results.”