Ontario School Bans Wi-Fi

St. Vincent Euphrasia elementary school in Meaford, Ont. is the latest Canadian school to decide to save its students from the harmful effects of Wi-Fi by banning it. Schools from universities on down have a history of banning Wi-Fi in Ontario. As usual, health officials and know-it-all scientists have called the move ridiculous. Health Canada has released a statement saying, "Wi-Fi is the second most prevalent form of wireless technology next to cell phones. It is widely used across Canada in schools, offices, coffee shops, personal dwellings, as well as countless other locations. Health Canada continues to reassure Canadians that the radiofrequency energy emitted from Wi-Fi equipment is extremely low and is not associated with any health problems."

Comments

Rational decision by school administration?

[jddimarco]

This may, in fact, be a rational decision by the school's administration. While the health dangers due to wifi may not be real, the (often irrational) fear that some people (e.g. parents) have of wifi is, unfortunately, very real. If enough people are sufficiently afraid, and their fear is causing a great deal of difficulty, banning wifi may be the most straightforward solution, especially if wifi isn't mission-critical for that particular school.

It's not the energy

[thethibs]

As usual, Health Canada gets it wrong.

It's not that the signal is low energy, it's that the radiation is not at a frequency that can do any damage.

They could boost the power to the point where it boiled the water in your cells. That's what it would take to do damage, because the wavelength is too long to break chemical bonds. That's the neat thing about quantum mechanics; if one photon can't do any damage, neither can a thousand photons.

Re:It's not the energy

[vlm]

Ionizing radiation doesn't give you headaches and inability to concentrate that goes away on weekends. Exposure to RF at microwave oven, heating-up-your-brain levels could do so a lot more plausibly than ionizing radiation.

Hmmm, not really. Most peoples brains are very well provided with blood vessels. Good luck cooking a living mammal brain.

On the other hand, your eyes cornea has very little cooling capacity. Its not difference of a few percent, its a difference of a couple orders of magnitude. Cooked corneas are not transparent, as a generation or two of radar repairmen accidents have unfortunately proven.

Blasting enough RF to cause heatstroke like effects to the brain over a long term period, are almost certainly high enough to cause instantaneous permanent blindness.

Suddenly blind people don't really pay attention to a slight headache.