ORIGINAL COMMENT · UNEDITED TEXT
I am submitting this account as a mother, patient, and caregiver whose entire family experienced years of serious illness while living in a home subsequently found to have an open neutral on the electrical utility’s primary distribution system underneath our home. After leaving that home, my daughter RH, now 19, then lost 5 years of substantive education, friendships, social development, and independence due to electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS), which is a sensitivity to everyday wireless signaling. I, too, continue to experience this sensitivity. RH and I have debilitating physical reactions with continued exposure to wireless signaling, including skin burns, blistering, rashes, boils, hidradenitis suppurativa, swelling, migraines, neuropathic pain, muscle tightness, dizziness, cognitive impairment, memory and processing difficulties, brain fog, exhaustion, and systemic inflammatory symptoms. For RH, attempts to return to school and ordinary activities after her year of medical leave were ineffective because of wireless signaling throughout the community. Our family moved into our Chapel Hill, NC, home in 2015. Over the following years, we developed serious neurological, cognitive, dermatological, and systemic illnesses. RH suffered profound cognitive deterioration, with neuropsychological scores in the first percentile; I developed cognitive impairment and small fiber neuropathy. After a year of our begging in 2020, Duke Energy discovered their corroded line improperly buried beneath our property. Magnetic field measurements exceeded 100 milligauss, beyond our meters’ range, and we experienced electrical shocks from metal surfaces. Unlike the electrical failure, which could be identified and escaped, wireless environments are virtually impossible to avoid. It is persistent sensitivity after moving from the home, not the history of our electrical exposure, that I am asking HHS to prioritize investigating. Without EHS, RH could have returned to life. Instead, she required medical leave, homebound education, and extensive accommodations under Section 504. Friends’ electronic devices and wireless networks became barriers to participation. She lost not only classroom instruction but 5 years of the friendships, independence, belonging, and ordinary experiences through which children become adults. Her medical history includes subsequent traumatic brain injuries, significant physical illness, and severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Her PTSD developed amid years of debilitating symptoms, inadequate medical understanding, and exclusion from ordinary life. Her PTSD is not, in our understanding, the explanation for her electromagnetic sensitivity; it is among the consequences of prolonged illness, uncertainty, and isolation. Her reactions to wireless signaling, the repeated disruption of her recovery, and the possible contributions of those experiences to her neurological and developmental trajectory need to be investigated. My own professional life has been profoundly altered. I loved my corporate career, but working in an office surrounded by wireless networks and electronic devices is incompatible with the symptoms I experience there. Our family is not alone. We have dear friends in two other families who also suffer EHS. Unlike our family, neither has a known electrical exposure. Yet they, too, experience debilitating symptoms associated with everyday wireless signaling. Physicians lacked validated diagnostic tools, treatment protocols, and clinical guidance. We sought treatment for individual conditions, yet no medical specialty could offer an effective strategy for the recurring illness we experienced in wireless environments. Again and again, doctors told us, “There just isn’t the data.” My response has always been the same: “We are the data! Why are we being dismissed rather than researched?” Our medical records, neurological evaluations, dermatological diagnoses, hospitalizations, educational accommodations, and years of documented attempts to recover constitute a substantial clinical history worthy of investigation. We need research directed toward treatment: whether wireless radiofrequency exposure can produce measurable inflammatory, oxidative, neurological, or cellular changes in susceptible individuals; whether repeated episodes are associated with cumulative biological injury; and what interventions might prevent, reduce, or reverse those effects if demonstrated. Research should investigate objective biomarkers, possible differences between people with and without unusual electrical exposure histories, and safe, effective therapies. Avoidance is not sustainable when the places to avoid include schools, hospitals, workplaces, and nearly everywhere people gather. I ask HHS to investigate the mechanisms and treatment of EHS so that other children and families do not spend years searching for answers while their health, education, relationships, and ordinary lives slip away.