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What If? The Public Health Perspective
Michael Kundi and Hans-Peter Hutter
Introduction
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classied power frequency
magnetic elds (MFs) (extremely-low frequency [ELF]-MFs) in 2001 (IARC 2002) and
radiofrequency (RF) electromagnetic elds (EMFs) in 2011 (IARC 2013) as possible human
carcinogens (group 2B) mainly based on limited evidence from epidemiological studies.
Additional studies on ELF-MFs published since 2002 increased the credibility of an associ-
ation with childhood leukemia. For RF-EMFs, the classication was based on large epide-
miological studies of an association betw