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I once had a lengthy exchange with a guy who
claimed RF from WiFi was making him sick. After
numerous emails back and forth in which I tried to
correct his misconceptions about WiFi signals, I gently
suggested that he go fi nd an RF screen room and
sit in it to see if the experience made him feel any
differently. I never heard from him again.Clinicians would probably say my email pen-pal was
suffering from electrohypersensitivity (EHS) syndrome.
EHS is claimed to appear in people exposed to levels
of electromagnetic radiation far below those high
enough to raise the temperature of or induce electrical
effects in living tissue. The problem is no high-grade
(double or single-blind, randomized, and with a control
group) clinical studies have been able to fi nd evidence
that EHS syndrome is real. Most clinicians have come
to the same conclusion about EHS as Eric van Rongen
of the Health Council of the Netherlands. Van Rongen
surveyed the results of numerous EHS studies done
with GSM signals. He says the evidence shows that
exposure to a GSM-type signal may result in minor
effects on brain activity, but such changes have never
been found to relate to any adverse health effects. Van
Rongen further concludes there are clear indications
that psychological factors such as the conscious
expectation of an effect may play an important
role in people claiming to suffer from EHS.
Many of the studies van Rongen
reviewed took place in the early 2000’s when
cell phones were becoming ubiquitous.
Though you can still fi nd doomsayers
warning about low-level cell phone signals,
most concerns these days are voiced
about WiFi and, increasingly, 5G
frequencies. And with the
widespread media coverage
of IoT and 5G technology, it’s
likely that the anxiety level
about RF fi elds will grow.Although no one has been able to fi nd ill effects
from low-level RF fi elds, that hasn’t been the case for
effects caused by news stories about RF. Consider the
fi ndings of Anne-Kathrin Bräscher and her colleagues
at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany.
They showed one group of test subjects a TV report
on adverse health effects of EMF, the other group a
neutral report. They then asked participants whether
or not they could sense WiFi signals. The participants
didn’t know that half of them were in an RF screen room
and weren’t receiving RF energy of any kind. The group
that had seen the EMF health effects propaganda were
more likely to report some kind of sensation from the
sham WiFi exposure, especially among participants
who were super sensitive to touch or prone to vague
gastrointestinal disorders. Bräscher also notes that
participants of the WiFi group reported more anxiety
about WiFi exposure than the control group and tended
to perceive themselves as being more sensitive to RF
fi elds after the experiment than before.
Bräscher and her colleagues concluded that
sensational media reports can make even healthy
people hypersensitive to minor symptoms they might
otherwise just blow off. People who tend to perceive
bodily symptoms as intense, disturbing, and noxious
seem most vulnerable to having catastrophizing
thoughts after exposure to sensational media reports
about EM radiation.
In that regard, perhaps there is something good to
come out of our current pandemic: It has temporarily
redirected the attention of those with minor symptoms
away from WiFi and toward the fl u as being a likely
culprit. But over the long term, there are ample
reasons for researchers to stop proposing increasingly
implausible links between EHS syndrome and RF.No, IoT RF radiation
won’t cause a pandemic
Rongen further concludes there are clear indications
that psychological factors such as the conscious
expectation of an effect may play an important
role in people claiming to suffer from EHS.
Many of the studies van Rongen
reviewed took place in the early 2000’s when
cell phones were becoming ubiquitous.
Though you can still fi nd doomsayers
warning about low-level cell phone signals,
most concerns these days are voiced
about WiFi and, increasingly, 5G
frequencies. And with the
widespread media coverage
of IoT and 5G technology, it’s
likely that the anxiety level
about RF fi elds will grow.2 DESIGN WORLD — EE NETWORK^4 •^2020 eeworldonline.com | designworldonline.com
LELAND TESCHLER | EXECUTIVE EDITOR