Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ames!nrl-cmf!ukma!gatech!mcnc!ecsvax!mipos3!cadev4!ekwok@decwrl.dec.com
From: mipos3!cadev4!ekwok@decwrl.dec.com (Edward C. Kwok)
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Re: VDTs again
Message-ID: <5342@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>
Date: 15 Sep 88 00:05:48 GMT
References: <5303@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>
Sender: skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu
Organization: Who's who in Anonymity, 1988
Lines: 36
Approved: skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Moderator -- Trish Roberts)
Comments-to: comp-women-request@cs.purdue.edu
Submissions-to: comp-women@cs.purdue.edu


In article <5303@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Patricia Roberts) writes:
>.  It has not been shown that there is a
>cause-effect relationship between VDTs and miscarriage; there have
>been clusters of miscarriages which may be due to things other than
>VDTs. 


There was recently a study by the Kaiser Foundation hospitals in the
Northern California region, and found that women working with VDT
have significantly higher miscarriage rate than the general population.
I don't know about the details of the study, but I kind of doubt the
results. (How do you separate the other aspects of work from the use
of VDT? For example, if programmers who don't use VDT has appreciably
lower miscarriage rate than those programmers working with VDT?  Comparing 
very different jobs (say, programmers versus construction workers) and
blame it on the VDT is not fair: maybe jobs with VDT are inherently more
stressful, quite unlikely though.


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"Just as sure as I am a major in the Union army."

                         - Somebody famous said that -

[An article on this study was posted in this group early on.  The
group has been archived, so if anyone needs a copy, it's still around.
Note that a more recent article in the NY _Times_ indicates that job
stress does have something to do with it.  Also, an article on miscarriages
in _Time_ (I'll grant it's not a magazine I trust very far, so this may
be wrong) says that 1/3 of all pregnancies end in miscarriage and that
women frequently miscarriage without even knowing they were pregnant.
Hence, a study like the one at Kaiser might show a high incidence of mis-
carriage simply because women found out they were pregnant and found out
they miscarried when, under normal circumstances, they would not have
known either.  TR]