Far more serious are its implications for the credibility of science, particularly government-funded science. To be sure, the scare over power lines never reached epidemic proportions. First advanced in 1979, the thesis was eventually discredited by such eminent scientific groups as the National Research Council and the American Physical Society.
Prudent avoidance sounds like a sensible caution.
In fact, it constitutes a rejection of science and a triumph of fear over reason. All of this expenditure was directed at what we now know is a phony health risk. The answer lies in the peculiar way in which environmental health researchers operate. They are, to begin with, a self-selected group with an inherent bias toward indicting industrial environmental agents as causes of disease. Often, this leads them to become emotionally wedded to their own hypotheses, to the detriment of scientific objectivity.