An interesting article appeared in the Independent today entitled Electronic Smog:

Invisible “smog”, created by the electricity that powers our civilisation, is giving children cancer, causing miscarriages and suicides and making some people allergic to modern life, new scientific evidence reveals.

This is hardly anything new: claims in the UK about pylons causing cancer have been made for years, and questions about mobile phones being a health hazard have been made for a long time. Both have been treated with the usual ping-pong of studies refuting the claims for and against (see here for pylons, here for mobiles). The BBC reported in 2000 about a woman who was so sensitive to electricity that she couldn’t even wear a battery powered watch, and experience sharp pain whenever walking on ground that covered power cables.

What’s interesting about the recent claims is that it is an about face for the UK Health Protection Agency. Regarding mobiles, their website claims that “there is no firm evidence of serious adverse health effects from the use of mobile phones”, while on the topic of electro-sensitivity (ES) or electro hyper-sensitivity, the HPA states:

Although the symptoms are attributed to exposure to various types of electromagnetic fields, the review notes there is no proven scientific link between such exposures and symptoms. A number of studies have looked at diagnostic markers for electrical sensitivity but no consistent marker has been found.

Admittedly, they acknowledge that further tests will be required, and it now looks like they’ve got them. According to the Independent, “the HPA accept that the condition exists”.

Two official Department of Health reports on the smog are to be presented to ministers next month, and the Health Protection Agency (HPA) has recently held the first meeting of an expert group charged with developing advice to the public on the threat.

The article goes on to mention that some scientists now believe that Electronic Smog could be responsible for “30% of all childhood cancers”, The International Agency for Research on Cancer believes it could be “possible human carcinogen”, and a 2002 “report by the California Health Department concludes that it is also likely to cause adult leukaemia, brain cancers and possibly breast cancer and could be responsible for a 10th of all miscarriages.”

More recently, the Globe and Mail carried a great article entitled Does Power Corrupt? which covered the story of a Mr. Byrne who only managed to cure his hip pain by cleaning up the power in his home with filters and surge protectors:

Symptoms of electrical sensitivity include the joint pain Mr. Byrne experienced, but also a bewildering array of other common problems most everyone feels at one time or another, such as fatigue, headaches, poor sleep quality with frequent wakefulness, ringing in the ears, depression, difficulty remembering things, and skin rashes. The list of symptoms has created speculation that some cases of sick building syndrome, where people working in buildings complain of nausea and headaches, might be due to electrical sensitivities.

[…]

The nerves in living things work on electrical impulses. So do other biological processes, such as the voltages in hearts detected using electrocardiographs. This has given rise to worries that man-made electricity fields, to which humans were never exposed before the modern era, might be biologically active, just like chemical pollutants.

The WHO has been looking at electrical sensitivity as one aspect of a larger investigation into the health effects of the cocktail of electromagnetic fields enveloping people in modern societies via everything from power lines to cellphones. It says that exposure to electromagnetic fields represents “one of the most common and fastest growing environmental influences, about which there is anxiety and speculation spreading.”

It will be interesting to see what the reports say when they get released. It may well be that our technological environment is bringing about new, unforseen illnesses. (I’m reminded of Cyber-Brain Sclerosis from Ghost in the Shell’s Stand Alone Complex). For futher reading, I recommend having a look at ElectroSensitivity-UK, a fairly decent activist site that is updated regularly with any new news in the media regarding ES, and also PowerlineFacts.com.