And it has been studied. Extensively. And while I'm not current on the literature, the fact that proponents of the hypothesis cite only individual studies as opposed to meta-studies (and the fact that it is prima facie implausible as a matter of basic physics) is not encouraging.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

I would prefer to see evidence of thriving animal breeding installations under power lines, because all I know about is counter-examples.

Anecdotes are all well and fine if you have some sort of plausible hypothesis worth testing. But if your hypothesis is that the electrical field from a power line has biological effects... well, let's take a 1 GW, 10 kV power line. That gives you a current of 100 A, which translates to a magnetic field of 10 microTesla at three meter, or 1 microTesla at 30 meter. That's between a half and one and a half orders of magnitude less than the Earth's magnetic field, and between one and two orders of magnitude below the German continuous exposure limit (yes, the Germans have a limit for magnetic field exposure). And, as noted upthread, 50 Hz doesn't resonate with any molecular or inter-molecular bonds.

Oh, and 1 GW lines are DC lines, which means the fields don't oscillate at 50 Hz. AC lines are at least an order of magnitude smaller.

So if I had a million € for an epidemiological study, an application to study the health effects of E/M fields from high-voltage lines would pass the payline unless it was a really thin field.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.