Tower Switch-Off Embarrasses Electrosensitives 292
Sockatume writes "Residents in Craigavon, South Africa complained of '[h]eadaches, nausea, tinnitus, dry burning itchy skins, gastric imbalances and totally disrupted sleep patterns' after an iBurst communications tower was put up in a local park. Symptoms subsided when the residents left the area, often to stay with family and thus evade their suffering. At a public meeting with the afflicted locals, the tower's owners pledged to switch off the mast immediately to assess whether it was responsible for their ailments. One problem: the mast had already been switched off for six weeks. Lawyers representing the locals say their case against iBurst will continue on other grounds."
Faraday Cage (Score:5, Interesting)
The worst part was that he freely admitted that his wife was a loon.
Re:LOL, ROFLMAO, ha-ha, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Salem Witch trials. Not that hard to imagine at all really. These people are the modern day equivalent of those who think they're persecuted by witches.
Well.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps they've been coached into doing this? Like a conspiracy of some kind? Perhaps by lawyers?
ham operators (Score:5, Interesting)
When ham radio operators erect a new mast in their backyard, they often leave it unconnected for a month or two. When the inevitable complaints of baby monitors malfunctioning, televisions going crazy, and other non-sense crap from their neighbors blamed on the mast gets reported to the FCC or the police,
the ham radio operator calmly leads them outside and shows them the disconnected cable that goes nowhere and does nothing.
Perhaps commercial entities should take note of this, given our remarkable slide into the cesspool of stupidity where we believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories, vaccinations causing brains to turn into jello and yellow smoke to pour out, and how we're being poisoned by EM waves, and a particle accelerator's going to cause the world to end.
Seriously... There should be an idiot tax on court filings.
Re:LOL, ROFLMAO, ha-ha, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Correlation != Causation (Score:4, Interesting)
If their symptoms are real, an actual chemical being their cause makes so much more sense that it just boggles me that this isn't the first thing people choose to blame. But no, their insistence on it being due to EM actually gets in the way of the more straightforward investigation.
I believe that the simple explanation for this is that the idea of chemicals around the tower didn't occur to them as being the cause; it was so much more obvioys for them to latch on to the idea of microwave "radiation" being the cause. After all, the first thing people generally think about in terms of these towers is the microwave transmission not little things like pesticides used to clear the land near the transmitter.
Re:it's peanut allergy waves (Score:3, Interesting)
As an allergy sufferer, I can tell you that she is tired of armchair doctors telling her she is wrong when she has done 100 times as much research on the subject as you ever will.
If you just met her, I almost guarantee that's the case. I only discuss my allergies with people that care about me and actually want to have an honest conversation (see, Slashdot, I love you). Arguing with you about it is a massive waste of time that she has been through dozens of times already only to be told she's a loon job for not being like everyone else, so why bother?
Just coz they're crazy doesn't mean... (Score:4, Interesting)
Look, these residents may be complete fucking loons but...
According to TFA, iBurst furnished technical reports proving the tower was turned off in early October.
In other news, British American Tobacco furnished reports showing that cigarettes have no negative health effects.
In other news, Exxon furnished reports showing that increases in CO2 are likely to transform the world into a tropical paradise.
In other news, CIA medical officers report that water-boarding releases calming endorphins in detainees.
I'm just saying...
I Moved Away from a Tower (Score:3, Interesting)
I recently moved away from a cell antenna site that was placed within 100 feet of my kids' bedrooms (by literal distance, not just horizontal). When the site was proposed, I googled the research and then I spoke with the scientists regarding possible dangers. They were more than happy to speak with me over the phone. The advice was that there are no longitudinal studies, so they can't say what might happen when growing up so close to a site. That is, they need 10-30 years to actually conduct these longitudinal studies. They said "no problem" regarding the older analog stuff, but they said that there are stats that can't yet be explained. That is, there is a correlation for problems, but they can't figure out the causation when it comes to this multiplexing digital stuff. The ongoing research efforts seem to stress DNA replication (mitosis) errors and later meiosis. So, this would be of particular concern to kids and young adults where you have lots of both going on in particularly interesting parts of the body, like the three B's (brain, bones, balls).
The really cool thing is that the scientists were more than happy to speak with me. I do the same thing in my line of work. When an interested person calls, I geek-out and am more than happy to take the call and spend the time.
Re:Correlation != Causation (Score:4, Interesting)
People claiming to be suffering from ill effects from power lines, radio towers and signals from the martians has been cause célèbre for several decades now. I frequently run across these groups as a communications consultant working with utilities. Sometimes what I want to say is "if you are so concerned about power lines why don't you disconnect the power to your house?".
Right now since you are sitting in front a computer to read this, you are exposed to a great deal more RF energy than a microwave dish that is 100 feet up in the air is putting out.
It is like the hysteria surrounding cadmium in children's toys that is also this weeks latest worry. People will cite cancer clusters and anecdotal evidence yet when confronted with the facts they will jump to some other reason. After going through a long process with community groups and concerned citizens it ended up being an issue about what color the antenna was.
Re:it's peanut allergy waves (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a difference between "sensitivity" and "allergy". Celiac disease is a real thing, and can be confirmed by tests of the intestinal lining, but lots of people have gluten sensitivity and don't have Celiac's.
My wife is gluten-intolerant. She can only eat a tiny bit at a time (like a bite or two of bread), or she gets migraines. Why? I have no idea, but migraines aren't imagined, and the correlation seems to be real--as long as she avoids gluten and wheat, she's OK. She had migraines for many years before being told it might be caused by gluten, so it's not like she set herself up for it by imagining a sensitivity to gluten. Then, when she tried going gluten-free, the migraines stopped coming.
Who knows, maybe there's some other cause, but avoiding gluten works for her, so why bash it? After all, doctor after doctor could never help her at all, except to give her extremely expensive painkillers that kept her from being able to work, or just throw up their hands and give up. Honestly, doctors really aren't very helpful unless you have some kind of trauma or injury. Most of the time, they're just pushers for overpriced pharmaceuticals which help alleviate some symptoms at the cost of adding other side-effects, and most of which were discovered by accident. Modern medicine is not at all a scientific practice; if it were, researchers would be trying to learn exactly how biology really works at a fundamental level, but research is slow, hard, and expensive, so we don't bother much with it, and instead come up with lots of random chemical compounds and feed them to test animals and people to see what happens. It's sort of like trying to debug buggy software by injecting random bits of code, instead of actually looking at how the program works line-by-line and fixing the problem.
Re:Real problem in the US (Score:5, Interesting)
The result of this is that building a new transmission line in a new area is pretty much off limits unless it winds around to avoid existing structures by miles and miles
My dad was the engineer who planned the route for a new transmission line to a community which was growing very quickly. When the town locals heard about the route, they demanded that they bury the line (there was no alternate route) and they demanded the electric company pay the extra cost.
The company wasn't going to pay for burying the line, so it resulted in a game chicken. Turns out people stop pulling out these bullshit theories when they start suffering from blackouts.