APRIL 27, 2007

"The woman who needs a veil of protection from modern life"
           - - By VICTORIA MOORE

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No, she's NOT a beekeeper.

This woman believes that her bizarre headgear can save her from the dangerous electro-smog all around us. Can she possibly be right?

Before knocking on Sarah Dacre's door, I take the precaution of checking my mobile phone. It's switched off, as she has requested. "Last time someone came to visit," she warns, "I started feeling awfully nauseous. It turned out he had a picture phone with him and had left it switched on. A picture phone!" She pauses, looking genuinely horrified.

Apparently, this type of mobile automatically sends signals to a local base station every nine minutes - "No wonder I felt so sick."

We sit down in the living-room of the airy, north London house that, for the past two years, has been Sarah's refuge from modern life. Save for the absence of a television, it looks ordinary enough. But beneath the coats of magnolia paint, she points out, the walls are lined with a special paper that contains a layer of tin-foil; and upstairs, the windows are hung with a fine, silvery gauze. These aren't idiosyncratic decorating decisions, though.

All these silvery layers are here for a purpose: to keep the 21st century at bay. Sarah, 51, is one of a growing band of people who claim to be experiencing extreme - and incapacitating - sensitivity to electrical appliances, as well as to certain frequencies of electromagnetic waves. "Wi-Fi, or wireless broadband networks, seem to be the worst thing," she says. "Closely followed by mobile phones - particularly if they're being used in an enclosed space - the base stations of cordless telephones and mobile phone masts.

"I have to restrict the amount of time I spend on the computer or watching television, and make sure I don't have too many household appliances on at once, because that sets me off as well."

This may sound bizarre, but there is no doubt that Sarah's symptoms are real. To date, they include hair loss, sickness, high blood-pressure, digestive and memory problems, severe headaches and dizziness. They strike with such ferocity that, since diagnosing herself as "electrically sensitive" in May 2005, she has been marooned at home. She can't work.

When she wants to phone friends, she has to use a land-line - a significant advancement, it turns out, because she was so ill at one stage, she says, that she couldn't even touch an ordinary receiver without feeling a violent shock pass up her arm.

Food shopping is done as rapidly as possible, once a week, at a time carefully chosen to avoid younger people and their permanently switched-on mobile phones. And she can venture into built-up areas only if she is swathed in a net-and-hat ensemble made from a special "shielding fabric" that makes her look like a bee-keeper.

"I'm sure people laugh," she says, "but I don't mind as long as it keeps me well." Finding her own solutions - however outwardly bizarre - has been essential because, for the moment at least, the medical establishment does not even accept that her condition exists. Fortunately, some individual doctors have been sympathetic to her plight. Dr Sarah Myhill, who is registered with the General Medical Council and practices privately in Wales, says: "There is no doubt that electrical sensitivity is a real phenomenon - I have seen too many people affected by electro-magnetic radiation (EMR) to think otherwise. "

Clinically, I nearly always see electrical sensitivity in people who are already suffering from chemical sensitivity. "There are many symptoms that can be switched on by electrical sensitivity, and it appears that almost any electro-magnetic frequency can be the cause."

Even so, I cannot help feeling a little skeptical. Is there any suggestion that ES could be a psychosomatic illness, I ask Sarah (who, in fairness, does not seem to be particularly highly-strung). "Inevitably, people suggest that," she says, with a flick of her auburn, Farrah Fawcett-style hair. "But at one time, ME sufferers were accused of having psychosomatic symptoms and were ignored as a result. Now, the illness is formally recognized. "Before this, I'd barely had a day ill in my life - I've always been a very energetic, dynamic person.

"I had a career in banking, then in events management, and then I ran my own television production company. I was always busy and I was always out doing things - skiing, tango lessons, looking after my son, Josh, who's now 17.

I had a very active life and I loved it. "Now, I have no income because I can't work and I have no choice but to devote all my energies to fighting to find out more about my allergies." The first symptoms started about five years ago. At first, Sarah ignored them, hoping they might be due to tiredness or stress and would simply go away. Gradually, though, her condition deteriorated. And about two years ago, she says "everything hit at once, like a car crash.

As well as the exhaustion and nausea, I even lost the sight in my right eye." A stream of doctors, complementary practitioners and Chinese herbalists all failed to alleviate any of her symptoms or come up with a diagnosis. Instead, she found an answer on Google - through websites such as:
electrosensitivity.org.uk.


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