Kevin Byrne is a man in the prime of his life who feared he had an old man's problems. Last summer, he was devastated by chronic back pain and thought his hips were about to give out.
"I'm thinking, gee, I'm 47 years old and I'm going to need hip replacements already," he said.
The hip pain was the beginning of a strange personal odyssey for Mr. Byrne, a technical writer who lives in Newcastle, a bedroom community east of Toronto. He is now convinced his ailment wasn't a sign of premature aging, but an allergy to one of modern society's ubiquitous substances: electricity.
No one knows how many people are sensitive to electricity. Scientific debate is intense over whether the condition exists or is a figment of people's imagination. Some estimates place the number afflicted at a handful out of every million. Others view it as more common but still a tad unusual, perhaps a few individuals out of every thousand.
Mr. Byrne counts himself among those unlucky few. He began researching the topic when a neighbour expressed the belief that electricity was dangerous. In an act of desperation brought on by constant pain, he did something he initially thought was off-the-wall. He spent $1,000 on filters that, much like surge protectors on a computer, clean up fluctuations and surges in the electricity flowing in the wires around his home.
"When you're in a lot of pain, you'll do just about anything. So I was sort of grasping at non-medical straws," he said. "I didn't think they would work, to tell you the truth. I thought I was probably wasting my money."
But within a couple of days, after months of pain for which his doctor could find no cause, he started feeling fine again. "I said to my wife, 'This has got to be the placebo effect,' " he said, referring to the well-known medical phenomenon of patients reporting that they are cured of illnesses after being given a sugar pill doctors suggest will help them.
Mr. Byrne also noticed another odd health effect after he cleaned up his power, convincing him that electricity was at the root of his problems. Both he and his wife suddenly began to sleep more soundly and his dreams became "incredibly real and very vivid."
Stories such as Mr. Byrne's are not isolated tales. In fact, they're becoming increasingly common, rising in lockstep with homes filled to the brim with electronic gadgets and the proliferation of wireless technologies.
Symptoms of electrical sensitivity include the joint pain Mr. Byrne experienced, but also a bewildering array of other common problems most everyone feels at one time or another, such as fatigue, headaches, poor sleep quality with frequent wakefulness, ringing in the ears, depression, difficulty remembering things, and skin rashes. The list of symptoms has created speculation that some cases of sick building syndrome, where people working in buildings complain of nausea and headaches, might be due to electrical sensitivities.
Madga Havas, an associate professor at the Environmental Studies Department of Trent University who is an expert on the health claims about electricity, says she receives "almost a call a day" from people who say electricity is making them ill and they can't find help in the medical system. "It's not just from Canada. It's usually from the States as well," she says.
She thinks the condition is more widespread than commonly thought, and speculates that for some people, exposure to electricity causes physiological stress, producing symptoms of tiredness, difficulty concentrating and poor sleep.
The possibility of such a widespread health impact from electricity is greeted with skepticism in the electricity industry, where such an effect would have wide-ranging consequences.
"We don't have support to suggest that there is electrosensitivity in members of the population," says Jack Sahl, a manager of safety and environmental issues at Southern California Edison, a large U.S. electricity provider.
The industry position has been bolstered by studies showing that most of those who say they have allergies to electricity are unable consistently to detect the presence of electric currents in laboratory experiments.
