Major power utilities continue to deploy “smart” electrical meters on businesses and private residences throughout the United States and Canada. Yet those in North America and elsewhere remain in the dark on the negative health effects of such devices that systematically blast their homes with radio-frequency (RF) radiation on a minute-by-minute, round-the-clock basis. In 2009 […]

Initially, Montrealer Pierre Lepage was glad to receive the letter Hydro-Québec mailed him in 2011. It announced the upcoming replacement of the six electric meters located in his basement appartment’s kitchen, by wireless “smart” meters that communicate with radiofrequency microwaves (RF/MWs). “I told myself, thanks to remote metering, I won’t have to fill out meter-reading cards anymore. But I was ignorant”, Lepage said in a 2012 interview after writing Quebec’s Energy Board to complain that those meters harmed his family’s health. About two weeks after they were installed, Lepage, his wife, father and teenage son all developed flue-like symptoms : dizziness, headaches, fatigue, nausea and loss of appetite. “We thought we caught a virus, but the symptoms lasted for weeks. Later, I developed heart palpitations and high blood pressure for the first time in my life”, the 36-year-old man said. He later covered the meters’ glass globes with four layers of aluminum foil to reduce their RF/MW emissions, as recommended by Villeray Refuse, the first citizen’s group to oppose mandatory installation of smart meters. “Three days later we felt much better”, Lepage wrote in his letter to the Energy Board.

Physicist, Ronald M. Powell (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1975) explains, in lay terms, the implications of the BioInitiative 2012 Report for Smart Meters and Smart Appliances. He compares the low RF power density levels at which biological effects were reported in the RF Color Charts in the Report to the calculated RF power density levels that Smart Meters and Smart Appliances can produce.