Bonneux L
Nederlands Interdisciplinair Demografisch Instituut, Postbus 11.650, 2502 AR Den Haag.
Ned Tijdschr Geneeskd. 2007 Apr 28;151(17):953-6.
Environmental exposure to man-made electromagnetic fields has been steadily increasing as the growing demand for electricity and advancing technology have created many artificial sources. Over the course of the past decade, numerous sources of electromagnetic fields have become the focus of health scares, most recently mobile phones and their base stations. The predictable reaction to these health scares has been 'more research'. This comment argues that studies of the possible hazards of low-level electromagnetic fields waste scarce financial resources. Many studies have convincingly excluded detectable tangible health hazards. Bayesian logic predicts that the likelihood of false-positive results will be great in studies lacking a prior hypothesis and using non-specific health states as outcomes. The health hazards due to the maintenance of environmental scares by false-positive studies have been neglected. The nocebo hypothesis states that expectations of sickness cause sickness in the expectant individual. Maintaining anxiety by fostering doubts in gullible populations about the quality ofthe environment they live in may cause serious mental illness. Anxiety caused by health scares is an increasing public health problem, which should be addressed in its own right.
随着对电力需求的不断增长和技术的进步产生了许多人工源，环境中人造电磁场暴露一直在稳步增加。在过去十年中，众多电磁场源已成为健康恐慌的焦点，最近的是移动电话及其基站。对这些健康恐慌的可预见反应一直是“更多研究”。本评论认为，对低水平电磁场可能危害的研究浪费了稀缺的财政资源。许多研究已令人信服地排除了可检测到的明显健康危害。贝叶斯逻辑预测，在缺乏先验假设且将非特定健康状况作为结果的研究中，假阳性结果的可能性会很大。因假阳性研究维持环境恐慌而导致的健康危害一直被忽视。反安慰剂假说指出，对疾病的预期会使预期个体患病。通过在易受骗人群中引发对他们所居住环境质量的怀疑来维持焦虑可能会导致严重的精神疾病。由健康恐慌引起的焦虑是一个日益严重的公共卫生问题，应就其本身加以解决。
