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posted by CoolHand on Saturday August 29 2015, @09:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the staying-indoors-without-power dept.

A French woman has been awarded disability payments for a condition which is not recognized by medical science:

Despite dispute over the very existence of the syndrome, it has emerged that a French court has recognised a 39-year-old woman's disability claim for "hypersensitivity to electromagnetic waves".

In the first case of its kind in France, the Toulouse court awarded Martine Richard €800 ($900) a month for three years - according to Robin des Toits, an organisation that campaigns on behalf of sufferers. Electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS or électrosensibilité in French) is purportedly caused by exposure to electromagnetic fields such as those generated by WiFi and mobile phones.

In a statement on Wednesday, Étienne Cendrier, Robin des Toits spokesman, hailed the news as a victory, saying: "We can no longer say that it is a psychiatric illness." Victims of EHS say it causes headaches, joint pain, sleep disruption and dozens of other varying symptoms. Nonetheless the World Health Organisation has no clear diagnostic criteria for the condition.

Richard, a former playwright and radio documentary director from Marseille, says she is now forced to live in a remote part of the Pyrenees, without electricity, to escape from electromagnetic fields.

The French National Agency for Health Safety of Food, Environment and Labour (ANSES) accepts that those claiming électrosensibilité have real symptoms, but note the absence of "an experimentally reproducible causal link" to electromagnetic waves. A report is due in early 2016.

[Editors note: If you want to see an extreme case of this portrayed, check out Chuck in the first season of Better Call Saul}.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:28AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:28AM (#229691)

    some people are just too sensitive.
    if they would worry more about useless stuff like the rest of us, they won't have time to register
    these "brain pains", damnit : )

    I can use cell phones but i prefer to use them in speaker phone mode.

    Also I don't like to go to airports: they are smelly, have lots of international bacteria traffic, have stinky jet engine fumes AND they have huge
    powerful sweeping microwave radars. Also the plane have radars.
    Incidentally the microwave oven was invented because some military jet mechanic was grilling his well-deserved-break hotdogs in front of the
    nose tip/random of the jet plane?