So, Wi-Fi sensitivity. As far as anyone knows it doesn’t exist. Yet people believe it does and people most certainly have symptoms of something. So, as the Telegraph asks:
So, the real debate today is not whether EHS has anything at all to do with WiFi. It probably doesn’t. The real question is – how can we help?
See headline.
We’ve got a similar one down here. Norwegian bird, claims she’s allergic to the modern world. So the Norwegian government pays her a decent stipend to live here. Quite why Portugal, the Algarve no less (one might understand about Tras os Montes but that’s not quite so nice), is not the modern world is unknown.
As Chesterton did not say, when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Quite why the government and the Tellie ought to be in the business of encouraging the deluded to engage in their delusion escapes me. Can someone please explain it to me? And while you are at it, the Tellie’s editorial policy. Why are they running this crap?
We’ve got a similar one down here. Norwegian bird, claims she’s allergic to the modern world. So the Norwegian government pays her a decent stipend to live here.
Delusional bint is given a 20 hour, 7 day a week, 365 day a year holiday in the Med (well, yes not really but you know what I mean).
Can anyone explain to me how this is supposed to cure this delusion? I suggest they send her to the Hebrides instead. Living there might cure her. That is if we cannot adopt the Wehrmacht’s highly successful treatment for mental patients – Faradization.
Faradization. Arrgh! Why have I never heard that before?
Any moment now I will have know about it for years… yup. Pontificator locked and loaded.
If you want to flee the modern world, Somalia is a quick ‘plane journey away where you can be free off all the modern plagues of government, medicine, electricity, sanitation….
From what I recall, no studies have ever proven that this exists, and have shown that basically all people tested who claim to suffer from it are talking crap. Surely the right fix for this is either psychological help or a placebo, depending on the extent of the problem?
We’ve got a similar one down here. Norwegian bird, claims she’s allergic to the modern world. So the Norwegian government pays her a decent stipend to live here.
How do I sign up? It has to be better than working for a living!
Wow, that’s the most anti-science quote I’ve seen… Today…
We should want to help such people, but what’s actually wrong with them shouldn’t be talked about?
If this is your ‘problem’, consider yourself lucky not to have real problems.
Isn’t this just the latest version of Total Allergy Syndrome?
jgh
If you believe Richard Murphy and his acolytes that’s the future we are headed for…..
Well, I have a worker in one of our offices who passed the rather impromptu test I set with wifi. It was completely hidden and she was unaware if it was there or not, and if it was there if it was turned on. She was 100 % accurate in her “guesses” out of around 20 trials, and she basically couldn’t work when it was on, migraine and nausea.
It was only the new high powered unit that brought it on, the smaller units affect her if she is right next to them but not when further away. It’s not entirely scientific, but I did do a series of tests (including lying about whether it was on or not), and she was quickly and easily able to tell if it was within about 20 metres.
So despite the scepticism displayed here I’m fairly well convinced that such a sensitivity does exist. It is detectable by that person, appears dose related (closer made her feel worse, and far enough away no effect), and low power units had no effect either.
What we don’t know is the mechanism, but I did enough testing for me to believe the affect. One last “clever” test, I opened it up and disabled the wifi part but left it so the power light came on; and left it in view. She was able in a very short time to advise me that she though something was wrong with her or it, because she felt fine this time.
Rare, never encountered it otherwise amongst probably hundreds possible sufferers, but this one, appears real.
Disparage away.
Anyone remember Sheila Rossall, from the band New Pickettywitch, in the late 70s? Allegedly allergic to the 20th Century. Eventually suffered a fatal reaction to the 21st Century in 2006 apparently. http://www.deathlist.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=3449.
Ed,
That’s interesting. Does she have a metal implant anywhere that could be tuned to WiFi frequencies because given what you describe she should be feeling nausea most of the time given the background RF we all live with?
The Norwegian government were spending a trivial amount (to them) of someone else’s money to make an irritating problem (to them) go away. Quite a simple explanation.
The only thing I can think of, offhand, would be metallic tooth fillings resonating at a harmonic. The vibration is transferred to the middle ear through the jaw bone & upsets the sense of balance. Hence nausea.
Being near to the transmitter would be a factor because the signal strength attenuates as the square of the distance.
But….more likely bollocks. The signal strength & thus the energy’s minute
On the other hand. Once got a nasty surprise when the steel pin in my finger got accidentally microwaved. But then, we are talking about a power level enough to bake potatoes.
Ed, that is indeed interesting, and before I reached the points raised by my Brothers in Christ in North Dorset and Spain, I recalled tales of people receiving the Home Service through their fillings.
There are a number of people who are sensitive to particular things.
Including wifi.
Can shield a room or even a house. Easiiest way is of course distance.
Sadly I am addicted to computers, tablets and mobile phone so accept the nausea as a constant outside the bedroom.
And yes, I do pass blind tests regarding wifi amongst other things.
Nut cases – e.g. paranoid schizophrenics – are always up with the latest technology. One they were being spied on by the golf balls in IBM typewriters, now by wifi.
It would be a lark to claim that photovoltaic electricity generators make you ill, and see how many of the poor souls adopt the notion. It wouldn’t do them any harm because they’d otherwise adopt some other fear: it’s the parakeets, doctor, they’re spying on me.
Has the simple tin foil hat gone out of fashion south of the border and across the channel?
We’ve got an entire political party and its supporters who must wear them under their toupees given how utterly impervious they are to any sort of fact that conflicts with their dipshit entrenched opinions, never mind wi fi.
Wonder if there’s any link to sense of direction, it’s been shown that some people have more sensitivity to magnetic fields than others, though compared to, say homing pigeons, a very weak sense.
Sensitivity to light spectrum also varies (colour blindness) so a very small % being bothered when stood next or close to a strong wifi unit I can believe, it’s the ones that claim background RF level or weak sources that aren’t believable.
So the example above I have no problem, the teacher that complains the school wi-fi wherever they are in the building is a problem less so as at that level sensitivity they couldn’t function in many places that have public wifi.
Norway?
huh – that figures …. Sometime PM and full time progressive sanctimonious busybody Gro Harlem Bruntland claimed electro sensitivity – and being that sort of a progressive no doubt sought to mitigate the impact of radio radiation on her fellow citizens real – or imagined as per the Victim’s Charter.
I’d have sent the gel to the Lofoten Islands rather than Albafuera or whereever …
Surely there are places in Norway that are much more remote from modernity than Portugal.
I can’t help feeling that a period of residence in Spitzbergen might clear up her problems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spitsbergen
Well, some of them
The plausibility of wifichondria founders on order-of-magnitude considerations. The lowest power signal that a mobile phone will handle is conventionally set at -113 dBm, which is about 5 femtowatts. At full wick a WiFi router is putting out 20 dBm or 100 mW, basically isotropically, so 2m away the flux is about 2 mW·m⁻². Microwave photons in the mobile comms spectrum are of the order of 10 μeV. Field strengths (rms) are in the mV/m to nV/m range if you are in a location where you are getting an acceptable signal out of your router. Magnetic fields are typically nanotesla or picotesla. By comparison, the Earth’s magnetic field is of the order of tens of microtesla.
Humans don’t absorb gigahertz microwave radiation all that well (which is a good thing otherwise you’d have to turn your head so it wasn’t in-between your phone and the cell tower). The whole idea of EM sensitivity is witchcraft piled on top of homoeopathy on top of dowsing for fucking ley lines. These people should be put in a Faraday cage in a mu-metal box and fed through a slot in the wall occasionally.
Person doesn’t have, to her knowledge, metal implants of any sort. Yes, the power is low, But distance does matter, at greater than about 20 metres from the transmitter the effect is barely detectable to her. That helps me believe it is real, there is a “dose related” effect.
I wondered if it was the different wavelengths used by the latest WAP units, but I’ve since installed a network of low power devices and she isn’t bothered and I believe they use the same frequencies. It does seem like a threshold exists to, I don’t know, create some sort of feedback resonance loop (sounds good but doesn’t mean much). The mechanism is a mystery, but I’m reasonably convinced that something is going on, for relatively rare individuals.
We’ve got an entire political party and its supporters who must wear them under their toupees given how utterly impervious they are to any sort of fact that conflicts with their dipshit entrenched opinions, never mind wi fi.
Why limit yourself to UKIP when there are so many to choose from?
Has she tried reversing the polarity on the neutron flux ?
I used tio get massive headaches from those ionisers that were popular in the 80s.
Why not Svalbard? That’s so remote from modern civilization that they chose to put an international seed repository there.
Oh wait … this really wasn’t about getting away from it all, was it?