From: xtkmg@trentu.ca (Kate Gregory)
Subject: VDT's in Pregnancy (was Re: Newly Pregnant (what to do?)
Organization: Trent University, Ontario
Distribution: na
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 14:58:36 GMT

In article <1992Dec27.001846.8305@INRS-Telecom.UQuebec.CA> hollan@INRS-Telecom.UQuebec.CA (Rene Hollan) writes:
>
>Anyway, onto my reasons for posting. I thought I would get others opinion on
>pregnant moms using VDT's. I have heard so many different views on the subject
>and don't know what to do. As I can't get an answer from my GYN until the 5th
>I thought I would ask you what your doctor may have told you. I am hoping
>that this is safe because I would miss not reading the net. Please send me 

Well, let me give you the short answer first: you're fine sitting in
front of a video display terminal or television, but avoid being
*behind* them. If your office is set up with people's terminals
back-to-back you may want to ask it be re-arranged so you don't sit
behind someone else's screen.

Now, the long version. You have probably heard (most people have)
about the clusters of unhappy pregnancy outcomes in office situations.
These started coming to light in the seventies and eighties. For
example, over a year, 20 women would conceive, 13 would miscarry,
two would have preterm labour, 3 would have a birth defect of some
kind and only two would have a full term healthy baby. All these women
worked at VDT's, and the folk wisdom was that this was all they had
in common and all that was different between them and their predecessors
of ten years or so earlier who had not had problem pregnancies.
So people came to believe that VDT's must cause problems in pregnancy.

There were several problems with this belief. In no particular
order, they are:
  - the fact that clusters of anything are a natural statistical
    occurrence. Take miscarriages. About 1/3 of pregnancies are
    miscarried, so you would expect 6 of our mythical twenty to
    miscarry. Seing double the expected amount in this office looks
    scary. But what about the office down the street with only 1
    miscarriage in its twenty pregnancies? You can't just look at
    the groups that had a higher than average incidence of problems
    and insist those problems had a single cause. Average means that
    some are higher and some are lower.
 
  - The fact that the problems and unhappy outcomes were so varied.
    No single defect or problem kept recurring. In other cluster cases
    there is one thing going on consistently, like enormous rates of
    childhood cancer in a small town or high rates of adult lung cancer
    in a certain occupation. No such commonality was established here.

  - The fact that the women, almost exclusively secretaries, had
    experienced many changes in their jobs as VDT's were introduced,
    including more time sitting (no more walking to the filing cabinet)
    and more stress than their predecessors. Also that pregnancies were
    being announced far earlier than they had been in the fifties and
    sixties.

  - The failure of various studies to measure anything coming from 
    the front of VDT's that could then be shown (in animal studies)
    to cause the problems that were being reported. Of course, some
    articles were overly sweeping in their rejection of VDT emissions:
    I remember reading that "absolutely no electromagnetic emissions
    were recorded from an operating VDT" -- light is an electromagnetic
    emission for heaven's sake and if it wasn't emitting light it wasn't
    much of a display :-), was it?
 
Over time, a clearer picture emerged. Sitting down all day moving
only your fingers is not healthy. The kind of stress endured by
being in the (now generally defunct) typing pool is not healthy.
Sitting behind someone else's monitor is not healthy. And
sometimes a run of bad luck hits an office and it looks like
something must have caused it, but it's balanced out by the run
of good luck in the office down the street.

Go ahead. Keep reading the net. We'll be here for you. And
congratulations!

Kate
Newsgroups: misc.kids,soc.men,alt.atheism,alt.sex.wizards