No one wins in this scenario: A man in Santa Fe claims his neighbor's use of wireless technology causes him to get ill. He has sued his neighbor, a woman who he used to hire to cook for him, and who purchased a house she used to rent. Electrosensitivity, or a claim that exposure to electromagnetic radiation causes illness, has been shown in dozens of controlled studies to lack any basis in whether signals or present or absent when self-identified and control subject were tested.
This case was filed in state district court, but will almost certainly be dismissed, not without some expense on the part of the neighbor. Courts have consistently ruled that the FCC is the sole agency in the US at any level (city, state, or federal) that has the power to set and enforce rules regarding spectrum. If you operate an FCC device in a form approved by the agency, then I can guarantee there is no basis for a suit.
While I am not a researcher, I have read tens of thousands of pages of studies on both sides of the issue. Some people believe (but cannot document) that cell phones may pose a risk for elevated incidents of cancer. Let's just pretend that it's always good to gather more information there, even though there are piles of studies from the last few years that can't find any correlation between cell phone use and illness.
But there should no longer be a dispute over electrosensitivity. It's become increasingly clear that people who claim that condition have a measurable health problem--Essex University and University of Regensburg both did work on this front.
Here's what I wrote about the Regensburg work back in August 2008: "The Regensburg study would say to me that electrosensitives need to be renamed: they're sensitive to something; it may even be psychosomatic; but the effects are profound, real, measurable, and (again shown in this study) not tied to whether a signal believed to cause harm is present."
I used to think that people with this self-described condition were tin-foil hat wearers. But in 2007, the evidence started to mount that these folks were not experiencing psychosomatic effects--they feel ill, and an industry has sprung up to impose quackery upon them.
A couple of readers sent in a link to this new paper on the effects of cellular phone use on mice that indicates "long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves associated with cell phone use may actually protect against, and even reverse, Alzheimer’s disease." Quite bizarre and fascinating; I've asked to get a copy of the paper. The researchers and journal appear to be quite legitimate.
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