“Sensitivity to electricity” a new environmental epidemic

The human body constantly generates symptoms of various types from different organ systems. Mostly these symptoms are innocuous, but sometimes they are indicators of disease. These symptoms can be attributed to internal or external factors. The external factors thought to cause the symptoms can occur in the work environment or in the general environment of modern society. The impetus for this review of “sensitivity to electricity” is a recent and ongoing epidemic in Sweden. This epidemic will be described and analyzed against the background of current scientific work in the field, it will be placed in historical perspective, and strategies for managing it will be given. The first reports on this phenomenon appeared in Norway at the beginning of the 1980s (1-3). A number of employees at the Norwegian Telephone Company had recently started to use visual display units (VDUs), and they reported problems with their facial skin, problems which they believed to be caused by the VDUs. A considerable work-up was performed in Norway, but after the work environment had been adjusted, the problems subsided, and no definite cause of the skin symptoms was found. Subsequently, isolated reports on a few patients relating skin problems to work with VDUs have appeared from various parts of the world (4-6). In Sweden, however, this problem has grown to epidemic proportions. A search of current dataS. Liden