Mother Blames Daughter's Suicide On WiFi Allergy

Tragedy can breed bad legal theories.

onDecember 4, 2015 at 9:55 AMDecember 7, 2015 at 7:32 PM

For many years now we’ve discussed the unflagging belief on some fronts that WiFi is capable of making people sick, despite no scientific evidence supporting this belief. Getting some shouldn’t be hard, yet the “electromagnetically sensitive” have yet to prove they’re capable of even detecting the presence of WiFi signals during double blind studies. That hasn’t stopped many of them from flinging lawsuits about, suing schools for making their kids sick, or even forcing school districts to eliminate WiFi entirely.

Every time I write something highlighting the absurdity of this behavior I’m accosted by individuals wielding “proof” of WiFi’s disastrous impact on the human body in the form of lengthy pdf lists of new age websites and aggressively-unscientific “studies.” It’s enough to, like, totally pollute my aura.

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And once again, WiFi allergies have stumbled into the headlines, with one UK mom’s claim that a WiFi allergy drove her 15-year-old daughter to suicide. The girl was found dead in a wooded area near the family’s home after sending a text message to her friend warning her of the suicide. The tragedy has been compounded by the mother’s decision to blame the WiFi at her daughter’s school for the death of the child:

“As soon as Jenny walked away from a router she felt instantly better so she was almost hunting out areas of the school which weren’t covered by WiFi just to do her work. “I remember saying to the school ‘if someone had a peanut allergy you wouldn’t make them work surrounded by peanuts’. “Just because WiFi is new and all around us doesn’t mean it is safe. WiFi and children do not mix. Much more research needs to be done into this because I believe that WiFi killed my daughter.”

Unsurprisingly the coroner couldn’t find medical evidence of any such sickness. And overall scientific evidence still doesn’t support the narrative of WiFi illness. As the World Health Organization has noted, nobody claiming to suffer from such a disorder has been able to show they can actually detect radio frequency fields, which, given the seemingly common nature of the complaint, would have happened at this point. None of this is to pretend that the medical profession is infallible (as controversy surrounding prolonged Lyme disease symptoms clearly illustrates), but the science supporting WiFi-caused illness just isn’t there.

More often than not the “tiredness, headaches and bladder problems” have other causes, ranging from a miserable diet and lack of exercise to mold or other more subtle disorders and diseases. Making entire school systems less productive because your gut believes WiFi poses a fatal threat remains categorically absurd, no matter how unfortunate the tragedy or understandable the grief.