Gérald Hanotiaux is a journalist for the Belgian collective Solidarité Contre l’Exclusion [Solidarity Against Exclusion]. Between 2020 and 2023, he produced a series of substantial, in-depth investigative reports about the health impacts of emissions from wireless technology, with a particular focus on the social exclusion experienced by people suffering from electrosensitivity/electrohypersensitivity (ES/ EHS), or ‘microwave syndrome’.
This extraordinarily well-researched series runs to over 130 pages and appeared in several issues of the collective’s social review, Ensemble! Pour la Solidarité, Contre l’Exclusion [Together! For Solidarity, Against Exclusion]. Hanotiaux’s investigations are ongoing as I write these lines. Hanotiaux’s reporting provides a sterling example of the thorough and fearless investigative journalism that this issue merits.
Sadly, no reporting approaching this calibre has ever been undertaken by any media outlet in the UK, where ES/EHS continues to be summarily dismissed and its sufferers routinely derided and gaslighted1; indeed, on the rare occasions when it receives any coverage at all, ES/EHS is most often misrepresented as a psychological disorder rather than as a genuine physical condition.
In ES/EHS, physiological injury from exposure to anthropogenic electromagnetic fields (EMFs) manifests in a wide range of symptoms across multiple bodily systems; according to the International Commission on the Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields (ICBEEMF), ES/EHS “is a humanitarian crisis that requires an urgent response.”2.
The translated list of the different sections of this series of reports that follows provides an overview of the extensive nature of Hanotiaux’s research thus far into wireless pollution and ES/EHS, only a fraction of which has been translated and included in this booklet.
In the three initial sections and the fifth, Hanotiaux examines the dubious, anti-scientific way in which current non-protective safety guidelines were set and are still clung to. Referring in particular to Oreskes and Conway’s Merchants of Doubt and Martin Blank’s Overpowered, he also highlights the striking parallels between the obfuscation strategies adopted by the tobacco and asbestos industries in the past and those deployed by the wireless industry today.4
Now, as then, the profits of industry clearly take priority over public health. None of these sections has been translated due to space constraints and because the playbook of the wireless industry and the concomitant dereliction of duty by various national and supra-national bodies have been analysed elsewhere in English, most notably, perhaps, in “How Big Wireless Made Us Think That Cell Phones Are Safe” by American investigative journalists Mark Dowie and Mark Hertsgaard.5
What follows therefore is a selection of some of the most salient sections of Hanotiaux’s extensive investigations, with the main focus of the excerpts chosen being the social impacts of the exclusion experienced by people with ES/EHS as these transcend both national borders and administrative jurisdictions6.
The final section translated is an interview with a Belgian MP who has ensured the establishment of a low-electromagnetic-emissions zone for people with ES/EHS in the municipality of which he is mayor. In addition to raising public awareness of ES/EHS and its appalling impacts on those affected, it is hoped that this partial translation of some of Hanotiaux’s work will provide UK journalists with a template for conducting future investigations in the f ield—as well as remind the UK’s political classes that the human rights of those with ES/EHS need to be upheld. Hanotiaux’s is just the sort of committed reporting that urgently needs to be undertaken in the UK in the name of fundamental human rights, social justice and public health; currently, the media in these islands continue to turn a blind eye to the terrible plight of approximately 5% of the population.7 Annelie Fitzgerald PhD.
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