Joachim Schüz, Clemens Dasenbrock, Paolo Ravazzani, Martin Röösli, Primo Schär, Patricia L. Bounds, Friederike Erdmann, Arndt Borkhardt, César Cobaleda, Maren Fedrowitz, Yngve Hamnerius, Isidro Sanchez-Garcia, Rony Seger, Kjeld Schmiegelow, Gunde Ziegelberger, Myles Capstick, Melissa Manser, Meike Müller, Christoph D. Schmid, David Schürmann, Benjamin Struchen, and Niels Kuster, Bioelectromagnetics, Volume 37, Issue 3, pp. 183–189, April 2016, online March 15, 2016
Exposure to extremely low-frequency magnetic fields (ELF-MF), related to power transmission and the use of electrical appliances, has been classified since 2001 as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2 B) according to the classification of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Monograph program. The IT'IS Foundation led the European Commission-funded project “Advanced Research on Interaction Mechanisms of electroMagnetic exposures with Organisms for Risk Assessment” (ARIMMORA), in which a series of experiments targeted to find possible mechanistic pathways to explain the association between ELF-MF and childhood leukemia were conducted. The ARIMMORA consortium applied novel experimental and computational techniques to examine evidence — epidemiological, environmental, biological, and biochemical — supporting the association between residential exposure to ELF MF and childhood leukemia and to elucidate underlying biophysical mechanisms. The ARIMMORA project was concluded with a risk assessment conducted March 2015 in which the available scientific evidence published before the risk assessment, including new results from the ARIMMORA experiments, were considered. The paper summaries the risk assessment performed at the IARC headquarters in Lyon adopting the concept of the IARC monographs.
The scientific, technical, and social impact of the findings of the ARIMMORA consortium reported in the publication can be summarized as: