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Massachusetts Boarding School Sued Over Wi-Fi Sickness
alphadogg writes: The parents of an anonymous student at the Fay School in Southborough, Mass., allege that the Wi-Fi at the institution is making their child sick, according to a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court earlier this month (PDF). The child, identified only as "G" in court documents, is said to suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome. The radio waves emitted by the school's Wi-Fi routers cause G serious discomfort and physical harm, according to the suit. "After being continually denied access to the school in order to test their student's classroom, and having their request that all classrooms in which their child is present have the WiFi network replaced with a hard-wired Ethernet denied, the parents sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act."
I'm guessing a whole new low has been reached here. Shaking my head ....
Tell them they have turned the wifi off to see if it helps.
Don't
See if kid magically gets better
I hope they don't have any cell phones in their house.
I hope they don't use a microwave.
I hope they don't live near any cell towers.
I hope they don't live near any TV or radio transmitters
What would be funny is if they had turned off WiFi in his classes and not told them, and they continued to complain.
The parents are apparently mentally disabled.
How can he be sensitive to Wifi, but not to the rest of the ubiquitous RF emissions that surround us all? Cellular signals, commercial radio+TV, microwave ovens, radar, etc.
Sounds like he needs to move to The Town Without Wifi
Bring in a portable faraday cage and have him sit in it. If he still develops symptoms then it's something else. I'll bet it's something environmental, like what they use to clean with, or something in the ventilation system. Or maybe the kid just doesn't want to go to school and has his parents totally foxed. Wouldn't be the first or last time that happened.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Easy way to win the Amazing Randi's million dollar challenge for supernatural powers. If you get sick when they turn the wi-fi on and feel better when they turn it off, you have the ability to detect 2.4GHz radiation with your body.
It's probably just asbestos.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Unfortunately, they have the backing of this guy who is on some sort of crusade to protect humans and wildlife from those oh so dangerous invisible EMF rays.
Even more unfortunately, he appears to be a bright guy with fairly well established credentials.
The problem is (and this is sometimes overlooked by judges) smart people can be:
a) wrong
b) crazy
c) lying
In this case I think it's (a) with a healthy dose of (b) mixed in.
Hopefully the judge takes stock of the numerous double blind studies where it has been shown that EMF "sufferers" symptoms disappeared when they were unaware of the presence of EMF radiation
From that physicians website
She treats cancer with homeopathy. "Supportive Care for Cancer: Possible treatments include: Complex homeopathy"
This makes me sad.
You know what they call the person that graduates from med school at the very bottom of their class? Doctor.
You precious snowflake is sick because you put him on a strick vegan diet.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I occasionally read about parents in affluent Marin, CA whining about this. In fact, there was a movement to prevent PG&E (the local power company) from installing real-time meters that transmit usage over radio because they were afraid it could hurt them. I remember seeing a parent interviewed on the evening news, with her kid in the background playing on an iPad. Did I mention that Marin also has one of the lowest child immunization rates in the country? Yeah. These are people that get all their "facts" from Pintrest and Jenny McCarthy.
" If he still develops symptoms then it's something else."
Yea, the student is full of shit and trying to get out of school.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
From TFA:
Specifically, the Aerohive Network doubled the prior emissions in Fay classrooms from 2.5 GHz to 5 GHz.1 Exposure to the emissions from the highdensity Wi-Fi now used by Fay is dangerous to persons having an aggravated sensitivity to those emissions, as will be explained in more detail further below.
It seems to me that more and more people are exhibiting symptoms of being allergic to modern life and all its complexities, technology very much included. But in this case I'm thinking more and more that it's just the kid not wanting to go to school, so he latched on to this mysterious ailment (that he probably read about on the internet) and is playing it for all it's worth. His parents, being totally incapable of conceiving on their precious little snowflake actually faking anything like this, is going Great Guns over it. Or, perhaps, they're scumbags and are trying to cash in through litigation on something they sold their kid on. Either way: Occams' Razor.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Why would it not be a stronger experiment if there were no lights at all?
OK, you run that test and nobody feels ill, on or off. What does that prove? Not much - your signal could be too weak or the wrong frequency, or the room could be interfering, or it need to send data in bursts or cycles, or both the signal and the blinking lights are needed, or... On the other hand, if you can create the feeling of sickness using just lights and with lights and wifi you can be pretty sure that lights are the (indirect) cause - making those 'what ifs' more implausible.
Second, it also gives you a chance to catch non-wifi issues that are making people sick. What if the school's lack of proper ventilation, or an old chemical spill giving off fumes, or the hot plastic of the router creating VOCs really is making people ill? We can catch it now by proving that it's not just not wifi, but also not all in their heads, and start looking for other answers.
I disagree. There is no reason at all to show lights if what you are really testing is sensitivity to radio signals.
There's no parlor tricks here. The lights are the placebo in a placebo-controlled study.
If you want to determine if a medicine is really the cause of the effect on patient's health - positive or negative - then you use a placebo to rule out the possibility that swallowing a huge pill or getting an injection itself is causing some psychological effect. You have the real medicine (lights+signal), fake medicine (lights + no signal), control group (no lights + no signal), and sometimes an alternative treatment (no lights + signal).
There is a known (or at least claimed) correlation between WiFi signals and reported illness. The test is designed to isolate the effects of perceivable stimulus (lights on the device) with the supposed cause of the illness (the invisible WiFi signals). Intuitively we all "know" that WiFi signals do not cause any physiological effects. But something is apparently effecting these people, and the test is aimed at figuring out what that something is.
=Smidge=
Maybe they it they are just sensitive to radiation in the visible spectrum. The obvious answer is to stick them in pitch dark rooms to help them learn.
Seriously, why does my air purifier need an LED power on indicator light? I can hear the damn thing if it is running! It shouldn't take 5 layers of duct tape to make it dark enough to sleep in my room...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?