The recent Pew survey on the status of science in the US public included two findings: the public is interested in the latest news about health issues, but it doesn't necessarily feel the press does a good job. Last Friday produced a clear indication of why. Multiple news sources credulously repeated health "facts" that were essentially made up. The reason? Someone claiming to suffer from a condition that doesn't appear to exist is releasing an album named after the apparently nonexistent condition, and wanted to raise its profile. In short, the news reports provided false health information because the reporters fell for a PR stunt.

Reports appeared in The Sun, The Telegraph, and The Daily Mail, and were picked up by Fox News and spread as far away as India. The articles describe the tormented life of a British DJ who is convinced that WiFi signals set off a variety of health symptoms, including dizziness, headaches, and nausea. With the proliferation of wireless devices, not only has this individual found it difficult to pursue his career, but also simply to find a house, shops, and pub that he feels comfortable occupying. And he is apparently not alone; the reports consistently claim that two percent of the population suffers from the same issues.

There's a fundamental problem here: the condition, electrosensitivity, doesn't appear to exist. A variety of studies that we have covered in the past show that people who claim to be electrosensitive are incapable of determining whether there is an active wireless signal in their vicinity. In multiple blinded studies, they did no better than random chance when asked to identify whether equipment that broadcasts on WiFi or cellular frequencies is active.

None of the articles provide a source for the two percent figure, but the scientific studies clearly indicate that, at a minimum, the number of people who claim electrosensitivity is much larger than the number of people who possibly could suffer from it. Based on that alone, it appears that the two percent figure is essentially made up, indicating that none of the newspapers that ran with the story performed even minimal fact checking on it.

That doesn't rule out the possibility that, within the larger population that claims electrosensitivity, there's a smaller group that actually suffers from it; they're simply masked by the larger group for whom this condition is psychosomatic. Still, there are a number of reasons to think that this isn't the case. The first is simple physics. The area of the electromagnetic spectrum where WiFi signals reside is fairly crowded, sandwiched among microwave ovens and cellular phones, overlapping with Bluetooth, etc. It's unlikely that anyone is ever completely free from exposure.

The biology also seems to suffer from significant issues. This area of the spectrum is extremely low energy compared to the energy involved in the sorts of chemical reactions that drive biological systems, so it's not even even clear that people are capable of responding to the sort of low-power, diffuse signal used for WiFi. (Note that it requires extended exposures to intensely focused microwaves to simply heat biological material.) Worse still, the sensitives claim to have specific issues—WiFi, but not cellular phone signals and vice versa—implying that whatever biological mechanism is at work would also have to be extremely selective about neighboring frequencies.

So, there's no indication electrosensitivity exists, and a number of reasons to think it shouldn't. Why would reports of a purported victim suddenly appear around the globe? Only the story in The Sun provides any indication. After the article proper ends and the text invites readers to comment on their own experiences with the apparently nonexistent disorder, there's a sentence that indicates the DJ being profiled has a new album coming out. Its name? Electrosensitive.

This wasn't a health story. It was entertainment PR.