🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug19.170303.15912@uniwa.uwa.edu.au> gude@uniwa.uwa.edu.au (David J W Emrich) writes:
>Hi Netland!

[discusses EM field from electric blankets]

>  Does anyone have any more info on this.  ??

Yes, it's being hotly debated, along with the "Do power lines cause cancer?"
thread.  I'm not sure what the best newsgroup for this discussion is, though.
Sci.med has had some stuff on it in the past, though.

>Namely...
>1.  What does it mean to be "pre-disposed" toward sterility?

The national average for sterility is, say, 1 person is howevermany.  But,
if we took you and cloned you howevermany times, more than 1 of the clones
would probably become sterile.  (i.e., P(sterility|you're pre-disposed) >
P(sterility in general)

>2.  How long is "some period of time", months, years ?

One of the many debateable points of this issue.

>3.  Is there any field emitted when the blanket is switched off?

For all intents and purposes, no.  There's some very negligible field
left, but you'd be hard pressed to even measure it when the heating element is
off.

>4.  What about the cancer risk?

Got me.

>Obviously, the simple answer is, no one really knows yet, but it would
>be safer to use the device to just heat up a bed, and when one actually
>climbs in to bed, the blanket should be turned off.

That's certainly playing it safe.  There are plenty of other EM fields in
this world to worry about though.

Due to the way that electric blankets are constructed, it'd be very costly to
attempt to cut their EM field production.  Part of the EM debate though is
over whether just what frequencies of EM radiation are going to get you.
If we knew this, we could perhaps redesign power supplies to minimize human
injury.

							---Joel Kolstad