This looks like some fake news story you’d expect to find on The Onion. But it’s actually real. A woman in the United Kingdom claims to suffer from electrosensitivity, a severe reaction to being around wireless electronic devices, especially wi-fi and cell phones. It’s very rare, but apparently also very real. Check out this article to find out more.
“The Woman Who Needs Protection From Modern Life” – via The Daily Mail
No, she’s NOT a beekeeper. This woman believes that her bizarre headgear can save her from the dangerous electrosmog all around us. Can she possibly be right? Before knocking on Sarah Dacre’s door, I take the precaution of checking my mobile phone. It’s switched off, as she has requested.
“Last time someone came to visit,” she warns, “I started feeling awfully nauseous. It turned out he had a picture phone with him and had left it switched on. A picture phone!” She pauses, looking genuinely horrified. Apparently, this type of mobile automatically sends signals to a local base station every nine minutes – “No wonder I felt so sick.”
Sarah, 51, is one of a growing band of people who claim to be experiencing extreme – and incapacitating – sensitivity to electrical appliances, as well as to certain frequencies of electromagnetic waves. “Wi-Fi, or wireless broadband networks, seem to be the worst thing,” she says. “Closely followed by mobile phones – particularly if they’re being used in an enclosed space – the base stations of cordless telephones and mobile phone masts. “I have to restrict the amount of time I spend on the computer or watching television, and make sure I don’t have too many household appliances on at once, because that sets me off as well.”
This may sound bizarre, but there is no doubt that Sarah’s symptoms are real. To date, they include hair loss, sickness, high blood-pressure, digestive and memory problems, severe headaches and dizziness. They strike with such ferocity that, since diagnosing herself as “electrically sensitive” in May 2005, she has been marooned at home. She can’t work. When she wants to phone friends, she has to use a land-line – a significant advancement, it turns out, because she was so ill at one stage, she says, that she couldn’t even touch an ordinary receiver without feeling a violent shock pass up her arm.
Food shopping is done as rapidly as possible, once a week, at a time carefully chosen to avoid younger people and their permanently switched-on mobile phones. And she can venture into built-up areas only if she is swathed in a net-and-hat ensemble made from a special “shielding fabric” that makes her look like a bee-keeper.
Read the rest of the story here.