Say you’re sitting next to someone on a plane and you rip open a bag of peanuts. They explain that peanut dust closes their windpipe. Do you keep eating and demand proof? As someone sensitive to radiofrequency radiation, I’m disappointed in your March 9 editorial (“Smart meter foes should produce hard evidence”).

We all have different sensitivities. As one adult respecting another, I would never question or invalidate someone else’s physical truth just because I didn’t personally experience it.

Perhaps that’s one gift that comes from having electrosensitivity. But I believe it’s also called empathy. The “hard evidence” that CMP is looking for can be seen, for example, when an electrosensitive mother fights back intense nausea to read to her son in his favorite wi-fi-enabled library. Or struggles against a head-splitting migraine to testify in a wi-fi-enabled State House hearing room about the dangers of a chemical that industry claims is “safe” because 100 percent scientific proof of harm has not yet been established.

The governor of Colorado just proclaimed May 2011 “Electromagnetic Sensitivity Awareness Month.” Concerned Maine doctors have been filing letters with the Public Utilities Commission, advocating opt-outs.

Meanwhile, the “scientific expert” hired by CMP to argue no proof of harm from smart meters is from a firm that has represented the tobacco and asbestos industries in cancer cases. There hasn’t been one health study done on smart meters. The FCC standards are set to protect an adult male from death by electrical shock. Even the head of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention wrote in an internal e-mail: “I never said smart meters are safe.”

So isn’t it reasonable for each of us to decide what’s safe for our families?