ECHOES AND UPDATES

Is there someone in your life whose guts you hate with a pas-sion? Give him a subscription to Boardroom Reports. Its valuable information includes cancer from electric clocks and video ter-minals, directly by ecoporn king Paul Brodeur himself [AtE Sep 89]. Discovery, Dec. 89, brings similar garbage, including a full-page photo showing that "the fields [power lines] emit are strong enough to cause fluorescent bulbs to glow." This is as stunning, though not as widely known, as the bathroom-scale effect: when you step on it, its reading changes from zero. I am old enough to remember when radio amateurs checked their transmitters by placing an unconnected neon bulb near the tuned circuit: it lit up when the circuit was oscillating.

We-told-you-so department [ATE Nov 89]: Science (1/19/90) has published an 8-page article "Asbestos: Scientific developments and implications for policy" by five internationally recognized academics, concluding that "The available data and comparative risk assessments indicate that chrysotile asbestos, the type of fiber found predominantly in US schools and buildings, is not a health risk in the non-occupational environment. Clearly, the asbestos panic in the US must be curtailed, especially because unwarranted and poorly controlled asbestos abatement results in unnecessary risks to young removal workers [and school children! P.B.] who may develop asbestos-related cancers in later decades." Not that EPAcrat Reilly will change his school-kid-killing attitudes: his business is posturing, not the environment.