# SCENIHR 2015 — EU scientific committee opinion on EMF health effects

> The European Commission's expert committee's last full EMF opinion: no established health effects from RF below the reference levels, ELF magnetic fields and childhood leukaemia still unexplained, and no support for EHS being caused by exposure.

- Canonical URL: https://emfbase.com/studies/scenihr-2015-emf-opinion
- Collection: Research record
- Record id: `studies:scenihr-2015`
- Status: verified
- Last verified: 2026-08-12
- JSON: https://emfbase.com/api/studies/scenihr-2015-emf-opinion

## Key values

- **Authors:** Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR), European Commission
- **Year:** 2015
- **Design:** systematic review
- **Exposure studied:** Static, ELF, intermediate-frequency and RF fields, including millimetre wave and THz
- **Place in the evidence base:** high
- **Primary document:** https://health.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2016-11/scenihr_o_041_0.pdf

## Finding

Updating the committee's 2009 opinions, it found no established adverse health effect of RF exposure below the reference levels, treated the epidemiological association between ELF magnetic fields and childhood leukaemia as unexplained rather than demonstrated to be causal, and found the evidence did not support EMF exposure as the cause of symptoms in people reporting sensitivity.

## What it cannot establish

Adopted in January 2015, so it predates the NTP and Ramazzini animal studies and the 2024 WHO-commissioned review of human RF cancer studies; SCENIHR itself was later folded into a successor committee. It assesses the evidence base, not any individual product or installation.

## Related records

- [WHO-commissioned systematic review of RF exposure and cancer in humans (2024)](https://emfbase.com/studies/who-rf-cancer-review-2024): A systematic review and meta-analysis of human observational studies found no association between mobile phone use and brain or head-and-neck cancers, including for long-term and heavy use.
- [Ahlbom et al. pooled analysis of magnetic fields and childhood leukaemia (2000)](https://emfbase.com/studies/ahlbom-2000-pooled-childhood-leukaemia): A pooled analysis of nine studies that produced the 0.3–0.4 µT figure still cited in every ELF policy discussion, reporting roughly twice the relative risk above that level.
- [Rubin et al. 2010 — updated systematic review of EHS provocation studies](https://emfbase.com/studies/rubin-2010-provocation-review): 46 blind or double-blind provocation experiments with 1175 self-reported sensitive volunteers: no robust evidence that field exposure triggered their symptoms, and support for a nocebo mechanism instead.

## Sources

- `scenihr-2015` Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR), European Commission (2015). *Opinion on potential health effects of exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMF), adopted 27 January 2015*. https://health.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2016-11/scenihr_o_041_0.pdf — government, link checked 2026-08-12

Data licence: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Dataset version 2026.08.1. Retrieved from EMFBase, https://emfbase.com.

This record is reference data, not medical or legal advice. Regulatory limits, scientific guidelines and precautionary values are labelled separately and answer different questions.