Electromagnetic hypersensitivity: a critical review of explanatory hypotheses, 2020, Dieudonné

Open access, https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-020-00602-0

 

As an on-and-off DXer (someone whose hobby is receiving distant radio stations), I've always found EHS and RF safety interesting. It's overwhelmingly likely EHS is people attributing symptoms to the wrong cause. One time, someone did a study where they put people with EHS next to a source of radio waves (a cell phone or a WiFi AP?) without telling them whether it was on, and asked if they could tell based on "feel." They didn't do better than chance. Also, one time a company put up a cell phone tower, and suddenly everyone started complaining of various symptoms, dizziness, headaches, etc. Embarrassingly, the company revealed they'd turned it off weeks ago!

Also, misinformation among people concerned about radio waves abounds. For example, a lot of these "EMF people" say 5G only works at millimeter wave frequencies: example here. Not true. It's being deployed across the spectrum used for cell phones, starting as low as 600 MHz. Or they use phone cases that supposedly block the radiation from them. But when you do that, the base station says it can't hear the phone clearly and the phone compensates by cranking up the transmit power, defeating the purpose.

I'm moderately skeptical of 5G, but not for safety reasons. Millimeter waves don't propagate tell. They behave much like light, so everyday objects like walls cause a lot of signal loss. Also, there aren't many things that require extremely high data rates but can't be hardwired. And there's a fundamental limit to how much data you can transmit across a radio channel.

If anything, I think the limits for RF safety are rather low. The biggest danger at low frequencies seems to be everything metal becoming an antenna capable of delivering painful shocks, and at high frequencies heating. The only exception might be that sperm cells are rather sensitive, but this only concerns the rather small proportion of people who are currently trying to father a child.

 

Same with multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0273230083710433

 

I found a study on double-blinded exposure. I don't know if this was the study I heard about, as this experiment may have been done multiple times.
Does Short-Term Exposure to Mobile Phone Base Station Signals Increase Symptoms in Individuals Who Report Sensitivity to Electromagnetic Fields? A Double-Blind Randomized Provocation Study

The signal level they used was quite strong, equivalent to standing around 40m from a 100W effective radiated power transmitter. Supposedly that's around the average power of a rural cell phone station, but urban ones may be much less, around 10 W.

 

That study does not disprove that some MCS patients experience olfactory PEM just like some ME patients experience PEM from bright lights or noise.