The Wall Street Journal reports:
Lotta Landström is allergic to electricity — so says her doctor. Along with hundreds of other Swedes diagnosed with the condition in recent years, she came to rely on state-funded sick pay.
But last year, Sweden’s famously generous welfare system cut off Ms. Landström, a 35-year-old former teacher. Electro-hypersensitivity isn’t widely recognized elsewhere in the world as a medical diagnosis. The decision to end her two years of benefits was part of a broad effort to crack down on sickness and disability benefits, according to Swedish welfare officials.
Swedes are among the healthiest people in the world according to the World Health Organization. And yet 13% of working-age Swedes live on some type of disability benefit — the highest proportion on the globe. To explain this, many Swedish policy makers, doctors and economists blame a welfare system that is too lax and does little to verify individual claims.
At a time when low-cost competition from Asia is clobbering Europe’s markets and straining its generous welfare states, governments from Finland to Portugal are trying to cut back and get more people to work. Sweden’s bloated sick bay, which includes roughly 744,000 people on extended leave, has caused soul-searching about whether the system coddles Swedes and encourages them to feel sick.
Read the whole thing.
EHS is not recognized as a MEDICAL disease in Sweden neither. However, in Sweden the organisation of EHS people (FEB, http://www.feb.se) is a member of the over-all organisation of disabled people, which is recognized by the government. Therefore, EHS is recognized as a DISABLING disorder. EHS people can get some support from municipalities to ENABLE them, e.g. to work. However, EHS is not seen as a disease leading to unability to work. But, EHS can be diagnosed anywhere in the world as undifferentiated somatoform disorder according to DSM IV (real physical complaints, as yet insufficiently explained by medical doctors). It is true that governments in Europe now deny unability to work. They act as if people cannot be unable, whatever the disease or disorder. The consequence is that people like Lotta Landström end up with no income.
I first noticed symptoms of EHS the day I got drenched in rain that carried fallout from Chernobyl. Sweden – along with Finland and Norway – was far more affected by the Chernobyl fallout than other countries, that is why they have a high rate of EHS sufferers.
Professor Olle Johansson, an expert for EHS, said that low-level ionizing radiation had been discussed as a possible cause. The link has never been researched.
Victims of Chernobyl in the Ukraine are highly sensitive to electromagnetic fields. It’s time to fund research instead of ridiculing those who suffer from EHS – Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Director General of the World Health Organization, is one of them. As radioactivity has neurotoxic properties it’s no wonder that a lot of symptoms can be found in the central nervous system. It is strange that psychiatrists who study neurology as part of their training ignore the effects of neurotoxins i.e. nerve poisons, They also ignore the research into mercury from dental amalgam that can play a considerable part in EHS.
I am very sensitive to energy-savings lightbulbs.
I have read that there are LED lightbulbs which
do not give problems to sensitive people. Where
are they available, except in America?