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Electrical Fields and Allergies

It may surprise you that allergies and electricity are linked. But I found this out nearly 30 years ago. When patients told me they felt sick after switching on the television, at first I suspected hot wires and chemicals ex-gassing from the insulating plastics, etc.

But the penny soon dropped that the actual EMF field was to blame and this could form part of an “overload” phenomenon, so that individual tolerances dropped markedly in an electrically “dirty” environment.

Nowadays, we are very switched on (excuse the pun) to the ways in which electrical fields and currents cause sensitive individuals to react. What’s more, we can predict that all this will steadily get worse, as ambient EMF fields get stronger and more complex.

Background

Planet Earth is a complex electrical environment. Even before Man set foot on it, never mind invented electricity generating machines, the whole globe was bathed in immense fields of charged particles, which in total power make our National Grid look like a glow-worm beside a nuclear explosion.

We are continually receiving bombardments of highly charged particles from the sun, the so-called Solar Wind. These sweep into our upper atmosphere where, fortunately for us, they are contained; though the upper layers become super-charged: the Ionosphere. Because of the Earth’s polarity, these sheets of electrical energy only dip down to near ground level at the north and south poles and this effect gives rise to the aurorae. The Northern Lights (aurora borealis) are, in reality, nothing more than a giant electric storm. Observers who are close describe swishing and crackling noises, typical of electric discharges, and occasionally tingling and the smell of ozone, which is the familiar odor from electrical sparks.

If this isn’t enough, then the whole rotating globe works rather like a giant dynamo, charging up the planet’s very substance. Thus rocks have innate electricity, called piezo-electricity. It comes to the surface especially where there is volcanic and earthquake activity, and is the cause of a greenish glow often seen in the region of a recent earthquake.

Occasionally this ‘rock electricity’ escapes into the upper atmosphere, causing streamers or ‘rays’; the well-known Andes glow is such a manifestation. Doubtless this accounts for a number of strange world-wide phenomena, phantom lights, apparitions etc. Even the flying saucer enthusiasts must concede that some sinister-looking lights in the sky have an entirely natural earth-bound origin. St Elmo’s Fire is an electrical effect which used to terrify our ancestors, especially sailors. A greenish glow surrounds objects, such as ships, buildings and even people under certain favorable atmospheric conditions. It is simply a harmless build-up of static electricity, but without the benefit of scientific knowledge it must have seemed a fearful, even diabolical, manifestation.

Then, of course, there is lightning in all its forms which, although intense, is a very minor effect in global terms and represents no more than a local build-up of static which then discharges itself.

Along Came Man

Then along came that inquisitive and inventive biped, homo sapiens (Man). By the time of the Ancient Greeks our species had discovered that rubbing amber with silk or fur produces static electricity (the Greek word for amber iselektron, hence electricity).

In the eighteenth century the Italian Volta (after whom the volt is named) discovered that alternate layers of copper and zinc discs, separated by brine-soaked cloths, gave rise to an electric current. The battery was born.

In the nineteenth century a Dutchman called Oersted discovered that a current in a wire has a magnetic field. In 1831 Michael Faraday realized the importance of the opposite effect: that if a coil of wire is rotated in a magnetic field, a current is produced. Thus the dynamo or generator was born.

This in turn led to other possibilities, such as the electric telegraph and Thomas Eddison’s great boon, the electric light, which freed Man from the shackles of night. It is impossible to overestimate the benefit of this simple advance, which lengthened the working day to a potential 24 hours and so speeded up Man’s progress into the technological age.  How much slower it would have been if we had all continued to down tools and books at sunset (there were lamps and candles, true, but these were not very good).

Finally, we arrive at the twentieth century, and today we have radios, TVs, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, ovens, toasters, clocks and a whole host of gadgets powered by electricity, at work and in the home.  Cables run everywhere in walls, under floors and over our heads. We are literally surrounded by electricity, in a way which would have been unthinkable 150 years ago.

In modern urban environments, it is almost impossible to get away from electricity.

Ambient Levels

We are now exposed to ambient levels estimated conservatively at a million times greater than natural background radiation. Some scientists put it as high as a hundred-million-fold increase in exposure. Isn’t it strange, then, that nobody, until re