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Mast hysteria: is 'electro hyper sensitivity' a real disease?

"Electrosmog" has been introduced to NewsWireless by an organisation campaigning for those who are allergic to electricity. And Electrosensitivity-UK has joined in the mobile phone mast debate, posting what appears to be a supportive message on the NewsWireless discussion board, with evidence Which, they say, we will ignore.

"With some reluctance, here at ES-UK, we are concluding that the situation of electromagnetic sensitives is unlikely to be resolved by objective scientific inquiry and debate," says this week's news bulletin on the ES-UK web site.

Objective scientific inquiry, says the story "would be the ideal, but is negated by the real world forces of commercial interests and money," and it also blames "the entrenched views and blinkered positions of Ivory-tower regulatory authority?s superiority."

The thread on the NewsWireless forum now has a contribution from ES-UK director Rod Read. It's offering what may be a new idea. It says: is it worth considering seriously that perhaps, in the way that some of us can literally be killed by exposure to dust particles containing nuts, or a drop of fluid with shell-fish life fluids, there may be a similar allergy to electricity, or radiation?

The first temptation is to be sceptical, and this has been (and remains) the Newswireless view. But that doesn't mean we think we know the answers.

The thing is, just because these people are not self-evidently right doesn't make them necessarily wrong. And even if their understanding of the science of EM radiation is dismal (search that site for "audible microwaves" for one example) it is still possible that better science may uncover an allergic response in rare cases, which hasn't been tested for in surveys that look at humanity as a statistical whole. Human skin, for example, is known to be sensitive to flickering light at low frequencies (around 50 Hz) and so are eyes.

But even if they turn out to have discovered a rare (very rare?) sensitivity, and some scientific explanation can be deduced, it's still a very very long journey from there to being able to support the "mast hysteria" which some campaigners are trying to create.

Rod Read claims that "we have not evolved to cope with this barrage of electromagnetic forces" and writes of an electrosmog detector [illustration above, right] which allows you to "listen to the universe."

The detector picks up radio waves, and gives the user an indication of how strong they are, and what they "sound like" - and it almost certainly works exactly as described, and does what it claims to do.

But does this mean that the danger is significant?

Short answer: not until someone manages to demonstrate the danger. We have evolved to tolerate literally lethal amounts of radiation - not just small amounts of background electronic chatter, but the killing force of the Sun's rays. We've learned to minimise our exposure to the Sun, but all the studies so far suggest that "electrosmog" compares with the Sun only in being electromagnetic. The Sun is millions of times more powerful and more dangerous.

Currently, good sense says that you are more likely to die of cigarette smoke inhaled as you walk down the street, or sunlight, or walking in front of a bus. And if you stepped off the kerb because you were on the phone, then truly, mobile phones will have contributed to your death.

To claim any more is, I think, to claim more than we have any hint of evidence for.

 Tags: Tags - electrosmog, mast hysteria, cellular radiation, mobile radiation, mobile radiation.