A while back I wrote a piece on RF sensitivity. I'm not convinced that everyday radio frequency harms people, and a big part of that comes from the selectivity of many claims: some people say, for example, that wireless networks trigger their aches and pains, even though there's been a storm of noise on the same frequency for years. Cellular networks draw others' suspicion, and televisions that of still more. The problem is that radio is radio is radio, and we have a good idea of what it does to the body given the frequencies and strengths at hand. RF sensitivity claims often have a curious fetish for particular technological objects rather than the technology implied as the true cause of the problem.
Not so for Debbie Bird, whose RF allergies have none of the eye-rolling inconsistency and specificity of, say, Kate Figes and her WiFi aches. Bird claims to be simply allergic to any and all radio waves, turning her house into the nearest thing to a lead-lined fortress surburbia could offer.
Here is Britain's Daily Mail:
Her particular issues would be easy to test in a controlled setting. This is more likely to be an autoimmune disorder, contact dermatitis or some other viral or allergic reaction than a new condition that would upend decades of research into the effects of electromagnetic fields.
At least, I hope that's the case, because that stuff can be cured. I've spoken with the gent quoted in the story, Rod Read, and he's totally on the level: to the self-identified sufferers, it's real enough. If they're right, this could be like a modern version of Polymorphous Light Eruption, or hypersensitivity to light, only on a much lower EM frequency.
'I'm allergic to modern living' [Daily Mail]
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