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Is Newer Fluorescent Lighting Causing Seizures?
Tue, 04/26/2011 - 14:59Recently, they opened a new Winn Dixie near our house. It has several types of lighting, all state of the art. The manager tells me it's a combination of LEDs, a few other traditional types of bulbs and some "new" type flourescent bulbs, which hang quite low, probably at a clearance of 15' above the aisles.
My boyfriend (I'll call him J) is living with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, he was diagnosed about ten years ago. As a result, he occaisonally suffers from complex and simple partial seizures. He has noticed that certain types of lighting tent to set it off.
The first few times we shopped there we didn't notice anything strange, but they were relatively short trips. However, one evening as we neared the check-out I realized that J was completely "out". He was standing, eyes open, in a daze. He could talk, but with few words and mostly said "what?" or "huh?" I'm pretty sure he had no idea what was going on. Luckily we had another person with us to get us through check out. For the rest of the night, he was completely (and I mean completely) out of it. He forgot what he was doing. He'd thank me for handing him a soda and opening it for him (but he'd opened it himself). Things like that. He was utterly exhausted, exactly the way he is right after a "big" seizure. The next day he was fine, but I worried that it was something in the store that had set him off.
We didn't go back to that store for weeks, but this weekend we wanted to get something specific from there, so we decided to try it. Knowing what happened the last time, I watched him like a hawk. Less than halfway through the store, I had to leave the shopping cart and escort him to the car because I could see that he was fading. He later admitted that he didn't remember how he got to the car. :(
Clearly, there is something about this store (opened the Fall of 2010) that sets him off, and likely anyone else that has a similar condition. I would really like to know if anyone else is having complaints about newer, high efficiency lighting. I'm waiting for the store manager to call me back with some details about their lighting, he needed to contact someone in maintenance.
I will update my post if I hear anything interesting from him. In the meantime, I guess we'll be steering clear of this beautiful, state of the art grocery store that we really adored. :(
Thanks for any info you can share!!
michele
Re: Is Newer Fluorescent Lighting Causing Seizures?
Submitted by 3Hours2Live on Wed, 2011-04-27 - 00:18
Hi ShellShokt, Some of the first ads for LEDs, claimed that energy usage could be further minimized by having them rapidly blinking faster than human perception, especially valuable for battery-powered power failure backup emergency illumination using the LEDs. Now ads claim the strobe effect is totally absent with newer LEDs and LED power supplies (about middle of the page): http://www.alternativeenergybase.com/Article/Why-Is-LED-Lighting-Considered-A-Safer-Alternative-/20870 To me, many of the newer lights also have power supplies that "whine" at higher frequencies than the 60 Hertz buzz of the power grid. Some of them seem to be near ultrasonic in the frequency of the "unheard" noise, like older ultrasonic burglar alarms, or the usually illegal crowd control against sensitive groups (usually congregating teenagers): http://www.amazing1.com/ultra.htm I'm from the days of analog turntables for 78 and 45 RPM audio record-players. Back then, we checked the speed of the turntable using a cardboard disk with strobe markings on it. The strobe markings would "resonate" with the coordinating rings to measure the speed. A makeshift strobe disk on a pencil or pen, spun like a spinning top, often reveals the lighting source as blinking directly or indirectly: http://www.vinylengine.com/strobe-discs.shtml As the electrical power grid is at 60 cycles-per-second, the power is cycling through on-and-off at 120 times a second. Heavy filament incandescent light bulbs hide this on-and-off power the best, and these bulbs makes it difficult to use the cardboard disk to check turntable speed. The earliest long-tube fluorescent bulbs connected in series with each other, without a ballast, came close to going through a "totally lighted" versus "totally dark" cycle at a 120 times a second, and the cardboard disk would work to perfection in utilizing the strobing effect. Minimizing the strobing effect in light bulbs is a trade-off with energy efficiency. Some of the newer sub-compact fluorescent utilize a much better electronic ballast that greatly minimizes this effect, but at a trade off to the spectrum of the light. Once the light leaves the bulb, filters only filter out undesirable ranges of the spectrum. Filters do not change the strobing effect itself. Though, some individuals are more susceptible to the strobing effect at certain parts of the spectrum. Diffusing the light from the bulb minimizes sharp shadows that would otherwise make strobing more easily detected by many people, but the light is still going through "bright" and "dim" strobe cycles. Even with an electronic ballast, when the bulbs phosphorus coatings burn off and the anoded mercury vapor weakens, and/or the ballast malfunctions, the strobe effect often becomes visible with "walking" flickers along the spiral of the bulb's tube, usually resonating with the power grid's frequency, because even with the changing of the power frequency to around 40,000 cycles-per-second in the ballast, the power grid's 60 cycles per second is still primary. Anyways, that's how my old analog old school memory remembers it, and down through the decades, all kinds of products were marketed to solve these problems with various gimmicks that never did quite work as well as they were touted. Tadzio