Dr. Paul Héroux emailed me in response to this article to raise a separate point that deserves highlighting. I have included this update in the article itself:

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Elite athletic training is built on deliberate micro-trauma — muscles, tendons, and ligaments are intentionally stressed past their current capacity so that repair mechanisms rebuild them stronger. That is not a side effect of training, it is the mechanism of training. The biological pathways that EMF disrupts — the same oxidative stress cascades and collagen synthesis pathways this series has documented across multiple installments — are the same pathways that an NFL athlete depends on most, and at a scale of biological demand that general populations never approach.

The epidemiological thresholds that form the basis of every public health limit in this space were derived from studying general populations — sedentary or lightly active people going about ordinary lives. Applying those thresholds to athletes absorbing full-speed collisions and running at maximum output for hours a day is a category error stacked on top of the category error already documented in the article.

As Héroux put it directly: “Do not assess the vulnerability of 49er athletes to magnetic field exposures based on environmental health metrics that are appropriate for their fans.” A credible review of the 49ers facility would not just measure the fields. It would ask what those fields mean for a body that is deliberately operating at the outer edge of its repair capacity every single day.