Can Solar storms affect pacemakers?

[www.ics.uci.edu]
[www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]
[www.livescience.com]
[www.solarstorms.org]

Internet is affected by severe solar storms according to this article. Pacemakers are nightly checked via wifi. I did read that flying on a plane with a pacemaker may be slightly affected by solar storms. I speculate it’s safe unless your AV was ablated for afib firing cells if located in the SN or AV node, and one becomes pacemaker dependent. In that situation a solar storm could become problematic I’m thinking.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 09/10/2021 01:15PM by susan.d.

No.

I’ll step into my EE (electrical engineer) role here and try to make some sense of electromagnetic radiation and penetration depth into conductive material. Basically, it sucks. Your cell phone doesn’t work well in a building, does it? Well, the building is made of metal. You (and I) are a bag of salt water. Also conductive. High-frequency radio waves just aren’t going to make it very far into us. That’s why the X-ray machine is huge and probably plugs into the 220-volt outlet at the doctor’s office. The Sun is 90 million miles away. Don’t worry about it as long as you’re on the surface of the Earth. Well, do wear sunscreen in the summer.

As an aside, for the interested reader, the US Navy has to talk to submarines thousands of feet under the ocean (salt water). Normal radio is out of the question. They actually modulate the entire magnetic field of the Earth to send extremely low frequency (ELF) messages to the subs. Like 3 Hz. It takes something like 20 minutes to send a three letter code. That’s how much radiation gets attenuated by conductors.