Yshield: New scam artist flogging ‘EMR shielding paint’
Tuesday April 10th 2012, 6:15 pm

For as long as there’s been new technologies, there’s been scam artists ready to take money from people who have irrational fears about them. This phenomenon dates at least back to the introduction of home electrification, which was quite mysterious to many at the time.

More recently, scammers have flogged fears about mobile phones purportedly causing cancer- and it’s been investigated over and over and over, with sample sizes in the tens of thousands and sampling periods of more than a decade. Not a single proven case of radio signal induced illness- of ANY kind, cancer included- has ever been recorded.

With the introduction of ‘smart’ power meters, the ignorant are again being exploited:

HAVE YOUR SAY: Just not what an Ormond doctor ordered

9 Apr 12 @ 12:01am by Jesse Wray-McCann

AN Ormond doctor has had her home painted with electromagnetic shielding paint because she says smart meters in her street are making her ill.

Federica Lamech said she could not work due to debilitating health problems caused by smart meters – even through she did not have one in her own home.

Dr Lamech said she had suffered continuous palpitations, chest pain, lethargy, dizziness, fainting and insomnia since the meters were rolled out in her area in February.

“I am not able to function,” Dr Lamech said.

YShield Electromagnetic Radiation Shielding general manager David Mould said it had painted hundreds of houses since the smart meter rollout began.

“We’ve done four houses this week, in Ormond, East Bentleigh and St Kilda,” Mr Mould said last week.

“Demand is so high we’re having to book jobs weeks in advance.”

She has taken sick leave from her Aspendale Gardens GP practice.

“I can’t work, I can’t look after my family and I need my husband, now the only breadwinner, to take care of me,” Dr Lamech said.

Stop Smart Meters Australia spokesman Marc Florio demanded the State Government follow the lead of the UK Government, which was reportedly planning to make smart meters voluntary.

Government spokeswoman Emily Broadbent said the meters were safe and their radiofrequency emissions were weaker than many other household devices.

Ms Broadbent said the World Health Organisation determined electromagnetic hypersensitivity was not a medical diagnosis.

Wow. A GP, no less, has been conned by an outfit called ‘Yshield Electromagnetic Shielding Technologies‘ into painting her home with ‘electromagnetic shielding paint,’ which Yshield claims has only carbon and no metallic matter in it.

First of all, any device with a microprocessor in it will have a circuit called a ‘clock oscillator’ in it. Clock oscillators generate extremely low level electrical pulses in the radio frequency range.  These pulses are used by the microprocessor to time the execution of lines of code which make digital widgets do what they do. Everything from pocket calculators and digital watches/clocks to TV sets as well as desktop, laptop and tablet computers have clock oscillators. ‘Smart meters’ are no different. Even with highly sensitive receiving equipment, the radio emissions from a clock oscillator are difficult to detect from more than a few centrimetres away.

Second, there’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever that radio signals- including extremely weak clock oscillator signals from calculators, watches and WiFi, to the very weak signals from mobile phones, the much stronger signals from microwave ovens to the very strongest RF sources you’re likely to find on earth, those being megawatt-level TV transmitters- cause ANY malady. ‘Electrosensitivity’ is completely imaginary, despite the hordes of unscrupulous ratbags (often on the internet) trying to sell cures and/or mitigations to salve this imaginary malady.

If you REALLY want to block radio signals- and there’s good reasons to do so, particularly if you are working with  sensitive electronic equipment that may not function correctly in the presence of stray RF fields (such as when performing an alignment on a radio receiver), you need what’s known as a ‘Faraday cage.’ A Faraday cage is normally made from brass screening or other highly conductive material that is connected to an earth ground.  There are paints around that will, to some degree, limit passage of radio signals, but all of them have highly conductive metals in them- but none of them will reduce RF field strengths unless connected to ground via a low-impedance path.

The nonsense being sold by Yshield is highly likely to do nothing at all, and worse, to solve  a problem that doesn’t exist.

If you believe you need RF shielding paint, could I interest you in my tiger-repelling rocks? See any tigers? Of course you don’t!

If someone wants your hard-earned dough to ward off those scary radio signals, they’re a scammer, plain and simple.

-weez