“Electrohypersensitivity syndrome,” or EHS, can be described as a set of symptoms experienced by an individual, the cause of which is attributed to artificial electromagnetic radiation from the environment. It is not a recognized medical diagnosis. In the absence of any medical description of EHS syndrome, counting cases is a difficult task. However, some studies have been done that show that the rate of people suffering from EHS syndrome has increased over the past 30 years.1
In a letter to the editor to the journal Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine in 2006,2 for example, Hallberg and Oberfeld presented data collected in Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States and suggested a linear increase in the number of EHS cases. They predicted that 50% of the population could become EHS by the year 2017, but the measured prevalence reached a maximum in 2002 (13.3% in Austria) and follow-up studies in 2006 and 2008 showed a dramatic decline (Figure 1, opposite page).