University Bans wi-fi as Health Concern

BaltikaTroika writes "A Canadian university has banned wi-fi, since the university President sees a possible link between electric and magnetic fields and brain tumors. According to the head of the university, "the jury's out on this one, I'm not going to put in place what is potential chronic exposure for our students." Is anybody outside of this university's administration concerned about this?"

Comments

"The jury's out on this"

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, where have we all been hearing THAT phrase lately?

Fact: Nobody has ever demonstrated in a repeatable, peer-reviewed, properly-controlled study that low-level RF radiation at nonionizing wavelengths has any biological effect whatsoever. For every study that shows correlated effects, two more show none at all.

Fact: WiFi adapters, even the gray-market 100 mW jobs you buy on eBay, transmit 1/10 to 1/100 the power of a cell phone.

Fact: Your microwave oven leaks more 2.4-GHz energy than your WiFi card emits intentionally. For best results, cut a 1" slit in package wrapper and rotate dish after 2 minutes on HIGH.

Fact: DNA damage from 2.4 GHz radiation at athermal levels would require a form of matter-energy interaction that is currently unknown to physics. There's a guaranteed Nobel Prize for anyone who can document such an interaction, because as far as anyone knows, we pretty have all the fundamental interactions covered at this point. Get cracking!

(Probable) fact: This joker has some sort of financial interest in a local commercial ISP whose business would be threatened by a campus-wide network. Nobody that stupid runs a university... but conflicts of interest aren't exactly unheard-of in that line of work, are they?

Re:What about cell phones?

[chriswaclawik]

Quick lesson: EM field from a point source: 1/r^2 strength EM field from a line/wire (theoretically infinite): 1/r strenth EM field from a plate (theoretically infinite): constant strength The derivations involve many repulsions and attractions of charges as you integrate along an entire line or plane. This is stuff you should know after learning multivariable calculus.

Re:What about cell phones?

[canajin56]

There is a widely discussed problem called electrosensitivity, or ES. Thousands of people suffer from it. However, searching the internet, I can find no articles on it other than conspiracy sites that claim that millions of people are affected, and the government and medical industries keep it secret because they love their cellphones. In fact, while these website site all of these journal papers and conferences on the subject, there references appear to be completely fabricated to make them seem plausable. The only actual scientific articles have asserted that such a syndrome does not exist. Several groups in the UK and the USA have conducted double blind tests in which sufferers are secretly exposed to EMR of frequencies like that they claim cause their symptoms (Monitors, cell phones, etc), and they did not react. On the other hand, when exposed to a radio device they are told is active, but which is nothing more than a box with a light, they react immediatly. These studies are dismissed by the ES campaign groups, who declare they are secretly funded by the cellphone companies. Some even declare that all scientiests are against them because scientists love computers and other electronic gadgets, and all scientists will forever bury the mounds of evidence.