French Woman Gets €800/month For Electromagnetic-Field 'Disability'

An anonymous reader writes: If you were dismayed to hear Tuesday's news that a school is being sued over Wi-Fi sickness, you might be even more disappointed in a recent verdict by the French judicial system. A court based in Toulouse has awarded a disability claim of €800 (~$898) per month for three years over a 39-year-old woman's "hypersensitivity to electromagnetic waves." Robin Des Toits, an organization that campaigns for "sufferers" of this malady, was pleased: "We can no longer say that it is a psychiatric illness." (Actually, we can and will.) The woman has been living in a remote part of France's south-west mountains with no electricity around. She claims to be affected by common gadgets like cellphones.

Comments

Electrohypersensitivity is real

[Misagon]

... but not a very popular disability, Especially not among people who depend on electronics for their livelihood, or in other ways in our daily lives - which is the entire user base of Slashdot. It goes without saying that someone with Electrohypersensitivity (EHS) will never ever post on Slashdot.

The theory behind EHS is well established in academia. The mechanism called NO-/ONOO+ - cycle is well known, and the trigger mechanism: voltage-gated calcium canals is too, and has been linked to the NO-/ONOO+ - cycle. The cycle builds up from prolonged exposure to certain chemicals, not electric fields by itself.

It is not an allergy, it is not a disease: it is a hypersensitivity. There is also not just one type of EHS, and not all EHS manifest themselves in physical sensation - which is why there have been many studies that have failed to detect it in people who claim to suffer from it. Almost every person with EHS has at one time or another had a job that involved strong solvents, and almost every person with EHS has also hypersensitivity to certain chemicals.

I am not going to post links to articles, because there are so many of them and you will in most cases need a degree in something or other to understand any of them. The keywords are above. Use Google! Instead I would suggest you search Youtube for lectures by Martin Pall.

That is not to say that there aren't people who claim to suffer from EHS who are emotionally unstable.
But ponder that if EHS was real, and you got it, and everyone you told about it called you a faker, wouldn't that make you paranoid?