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."

Comments

What does Science have to say about this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, they should have some kind of proof that the Wi-Fi is the reason, right?

Re:What does Science have to say about this?

[Firethorn]

There have been double-blind tests performed, but the subjects were quite upset when they learned that apparently it wasn't the wifi signals making them sick, but the blinking lights on the wireless devices.

IE lights disabled, radios fully enabled, on highest power, transmitting data: No symptoms.
Simulated status light activity, radios completely disabled and unpowered: symptoms.
Lights & radio on : symptoms
Lights & radio disabled: no symptoms.

Conclusion: Clearly we need to investigate the status lights. ;)

Re:What does Science have to say about this?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In this case, it isn't even a school board, it's a private school's admin, so it is likely to be even less their problem. A public school district is legally obligated to deal with basically whatever the residents of the area spawn; either in-house or by paying for an appropriate specialist placement(I think that kiddo going to jail makes him not their problem anymore; but if so that's about it).

A private school has no particular obligation to deal with anyone in particular; so long as they don't explicitly step on some protected class or (as is being argued in this case) fail to make reasonable accommodation per the ADA.

If it were a public school, it would be the school's problem, just as they have to make provision for the education of any other sickie(mental or physical); but for the private school to be obligated; it has to be demonstrated that kiddo has a 'disability' for ADA purposes, that they are capable of performing if provided with 'reasonable accommodation', and that the 'reasonable accommodation' would not cause 'undue hardship' for the entity being asked to provide it.

I'd be interested to know how the meaning of those terms would be decided in this case. Fay is a pretty fancy school, east coast private boarding school with history dating back before 1900 and its own endowment and all; but even if that mitigates any argument about the financial impact of having to hardwire everything, it might well be argued that, say, making it impossible for anyone in this kid's class to do an ipad-related curriculum activity would impose excessive limitations on their ability to learn, and the school to teach, as it usually does. If the school were purely doing wireless because it was cheaper, they might have issues; but today wireless devices are used routinely in situations where hardwired stuff would never have been considered practical; plus(unlike an accommodation that requires adding something, like a braille copy of the textbook or the like, the accomodation here demanded requires depriving everyone in the student's proximity of any use of wifi devices, or segregating the student, neither of which are likely to go over all that well.)

Re:What does Science have to say about this?

[bws111]

But the South Africa test and this experiment are both strongly influenced by what the subjects thought. At most, that shows that the power of suggestion overrides any real effect. But that situation is not all that unusual - I gave some examples above.

Why would it not be a stronger experiment if there were no lights at all? Just put them in a room with an antenna and have them indicate when it is on or off. There is no reason to provides any other hints or clues, real or misleading, at all.

Blind studies fail

[silas_moeckel]

Blind studies with control groups fail. It's not a fscking anything it's a flavor of hypochondriac, he needs counseling and possibly some psych meds.

Re:Blind test.

[Technician]

Some cell tower companies and ham radio operators moving into elite neighbourhoods with high lawyer representation often will pre build the expansion and not install the equipment to collect baseline data and use the new complaints and lawsuits as baseline of the pre existing conditions. It's hard to make a case against the new cell tower or ham radio operator when the court case reveals to the plaintiffs the only operating device is the obstruction beacon.

Later when the equipment arrives and is installed, the community is not informed. Only then can the real cases be identified. Most of the time, the numbers are in the 0's.

If you put up a tower in a nice neighbourhood, make it look nice. Leave it unpowered for a few months. Reduce power on nearby towers to make marginal areas worse. Offer better signal by upgrades to nearby towers. Switch on the new tower to cover the poor coverage areas. Result, more even signal coverage with fewer towers running high power to reach into dead zones.

Re:MIT WIFI Study

[Anonymous Coward]

Faulty or badly designed electronics create sounds at the end of hearing. For example I had a solar panel inverter installed and when it was turned on it gave out a loud whistling noise. Nobody else could hear it, so I used a sound spectrum analyzer app, sure enough giant spike at 16.5kHz. Turns out it was a design issue that was not addressed because only 1 out of 20 clients heard it. Or I had a laptop power brick which worked great brand new, but at some point started giving a very annoying 15+kHz noise. I just replaced it with a new one. It is very easy to test for these sounds, any phone with a decent microphone can test the entire hearing range.