Those who wish to impose wi-fi radiation throughout Brighton and Hove or wish to adulterate our drinking water with compulsory fluoride might like to ponder something CG Jung once said: "Everything better is purchased at the price of something worse."

When you look into it, I believe you will find this is indeed generally the case.

For each new convenience our technology dreams up and we scramble to enjoy, there has to be somewhere, for somebody, at some time, a related inconvenience.

So a farmer may maximise his crop yield but someone or some creature has to be poisoned.

So supermarkets can wrap their goods in attractive packaging but elsewhere there has to be landfill or incineration pollution.

So we can all zoom about the planet in cars or aircraft but the planet suffers global warming.

Once you perceive the pattern, you will find it everywhere.

Yet our society remains largely in denial of this universal revenge effect.

We are all too pleased with our new toys to want to know the other side of the equation. And much of the linkage between convenience and inconvenience remains scientifically unproven.

A growing number of people - up to three per cent of the population already - suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity, which can be a highly disabling condition.

I see this new disease as a revenge effect of our society's recent lurch into total electro-dependency.

Surrounded by gadgets and equipment in our homes and offices, we live amid an invisible but all-pervasive electro-smog.

No one knows what this may do to us in the long term.

In recent years we have been bombarded with mobile phone radiation. Every phone company apparently has to have its own network of masts.

And now this fad for wi-fi.

Schools have rushed to install the system, so convenient for internet access. Whole cities are installing it, so people can use their laptops wherever they go.

I believe if the radiation from these systems was made visible, they would all be banned.

No one would dream of spewing such harmful stuff over their fellow citizens.

I would beg those considering citywide wi-fi to think again.

Study Jung's words. Remember those for whom such a development might mean they could not live in this city any more.

  • Graham Chainey, Marine Parade, Brighton