49ers injury conspiracy theory with an electrical substation explained – USA Today

We’re all fully aware that the San Francisco 49ers have been besieged by injuries this season up and down the roster. That just happens to NFL teams some years — the injury luck is bad. There could be other factors, like turf, heavier practices, technique or — I dunno — the violent game they game for a few months a year.

But there’s a new theory floating around that has gone viral and has now been looked into: Someone on social media focused on an electrical substation near the Niners’ practice facility and stadium, making claims about what affect it could have.

What’s the deal here? Is this a real concern? Let’s dive in and explain it:

What’s the theory about the 49ers injuries and the electrical substation?

TL;DR: The claim is the 49ers have had a ton of injuries since moving to the Santa Clara stadium and practice facility, where an electrical substation is nearby. There was some joking — or maybe half joking? I can’t tell — from players over the years that the substation was to blame because Electromotive Force (EMF) is bad for you.

Are NFL players really worried about this?

Yes, per the Washington Post’s Sam Fortier:

Here’s Niners wideout Kendrick Bourne joking about it last week:

Is EMF really to blame for the 49ers injury woes?

The Post has an answer from Frank de Vocht, “a professor of epidemiology and public health at Bristol Medical School in England and a leading expert on how EMF affects humans.” He called it “nonsense.”

Other experts have noted that EMF hasn’t been linked to soft tissue injuries, and there’s also the fact that the team has practiced next to the substation since… 1988!

Here’s more via Front Office Sports:

Jerrold Bushberg, a radiology professor at UC Davis who chairs the board of directors for the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, tells FOS that “there is no firmly established evidence” that these types of low-level exposures have any biological impacts on humans.

“These so-called ‘mechanisms’ have not been established, and many of the experiments are contradictory, and many of the experiments have exposures that either don’t relate specifically to 50-, 60-hertz magnetic fields, or are at much, much higher levels than what would be experienced at a practice level,” Bushberg, a 49ers fan himself, says of the science behind the injury theory.

There is some talk from the experts cited in that Post article about getting more studies on the effect of EMF on soft tissue, but there’s a LONG way to go before there’s any correlation between the two. So maybe we pump the brakes here on all this and await more scientific evidence.