Is WiFi really that dangerous ?

Apology accepted most humbly, sorry I took offense where none was intended.

As this nice Brit seems off his meds a wee tad, is there any hard evidence that prolonged use of cellular phones pressed up against the head leads to ANY kind of health concern, or is this one of those horrific urban legends?

Extremely low frequency radio waves can make your head explode if you don’t keep moving in the direction of the wave. I saw it on TV, so I know it has to be true.

Using a cell phone in a car makes you about as likely as a drunk driver to get into an accident, and cell phone batteries have been known to explode every now and then. Other than that, no one has yet managed to conclusively prove any ill effect that results from the use of cell phones.

Cell phones also don’t make gas pumps explode and airplanes fall out of the sky, although they have been known to interfere with aircraft communication and navigation equipment on rare occasions.

My boyfriend is paranoid about WiFi signals. He makes me keep our wireless router unplugged unless I am using the laptop. At all other times, it must be unplugged. A few times, I forgot to turn it off before bed and that was Not A Good Thing. He is certain that when the wireless is on, he gets headaches. Mysteriously, I do not.

Anyway he really does not have any cites as to why he thinks it’s dangerous. He just thinks that it is a new technology that is bombarding waves all around us, and it has not been studieD, so therefore it might be dangerous… Me - I have no reason to believe it is dangerous unless there is some proof. And that is the problem:

How hard would it be to study this? Take two groups of mice and let one live their lives out normally next to a wireless router, and the other with no wireless. See which group lives the longest, which one gets more cancer, etc. How hard is that? Why hasn’t the government done any studies like this?

They have.

Wifi uses radio signals. It’s not really anything “new”. Over the past three decades, there have literally been thousands of studies on the effects of radio waves on living tissue. Not only have they studied mice, but they’ve gone so far as to study pregnant mice. They’ve studied mice brains. They’ve studied mice spleens. They’ve studied mice blood. They’ve studied mice immune systems. I seriously doubt at this point that there is any part of a mouse they haven’t subjected to radio waves and studied. They’ve also studied a lot more than mice. The world health organization’s web site claims to list ten thousand studies on all frequencies of electromagnetic radiation below visible light. I haven’t followed the links myself for the whole list, but here’s a link to get you started: http://www.who.int/peh-emf/research/database/en/

Note that not all of these studies came up with a negative result. Every now and then someone will publish a study showing some sort of ill effect from radio waves. A fairly recent one about the pregnant mice made the national news last year, if I recall correctly. The problem is that while some studies do show results, follow up studies and more detailed studies have failed to show the same result. As of yet, there are no studies that show any ill effect that I am aware of that have stood up to peer review and follow up studies.

My wonderfully caring better half suggested getting a full body scans to alleviate the worries…

The conventional wisdom on radiation damage is that there were basically two ways for radiation to hurt human tissue: Heat - which I guess is self-explanatory - and ionization, which is what scrambles DNA and thus may give you cancer. (UV is ionizing, which is how sunlight causes skin cancer.)

Wi-Fi - at least the most popular standards - run in the 2.4 GHz band, part of the microwave segment. 2.4 Ghz doesn’t pack enough of a punch to be in the ionizing range, so heat is the only concern. Heat can be bad enough, if there’s enough power behind it - but wi-fi isn’t powerful.

With 2.4 GHZ being an unregulated band, the FCC dictates that you can only transmit a weak signal - to prevent one spoilsport from jamming the band for miles around him. So wi-fi routers are hamstrung to transmitting at an energy level equivalent to 1 W propagating in a perfectly spherical manner. (OK, 6 W if they’re fixed, point-to-point antennas. Shaddup.) That’s not a whole lot of energy to convert to heat. And it gets better: The signal decreases proportionally to the cube of the distance to the antenna. Most portable phones are in the same band, btw.

The phenomena are well understood, and the research has already been done in a more general manner - as in, “what radiation levels at what frequencies have what effects?”. Specific wi-fi research is sorta pointless. (Or: What engineer_comp_geek said.)

Incidentally, this quote from the linked article:

had me wondering whether that department is aptly named.

Nitpick, the signal decreases proportionally to the square of the distance to the antenna; the antenna acts as a point source of radio waves, and at any given point, a distance R away from the antenna, the signal is spread out over a spherical region of area 4piR[sup]2[/sup], thus the inverse square law.

Imagine how their budget would soar if they were named " Department of Magyck" ??

:wink:

Here’s an idea. Some night, be sure the WiFi is off and go to bed. Next morning, hinting that you forgot to turn it off, ask him if he has a headache. If he does, you know what to do.

It worked to uncover Blondlot. He saw N-rays only when he was expecting them, but they were totally imaginary.

Angua is, of course, right. I blame my keyboard.

WiFi is dangerous, or at least it is if you don’t take steps to secure your wireless network. Someone could get on your network and do something illegal (such as downloading child pornography).

Health-wise, though, I think you’re more likely to injure yourself by tripping over an ethernet cable than to get some as-yet-unknown health effects from WiFi radiation.

My WiFi network at home does have one adverse health effect. Sometimes, for no reason we can determine, it just randomly stops working, and needs to be unplugged and re-plugged. This annoys us, so it probably raises our blood pressure by some small amount.

Giant power lines are noisy and ugly, and interfere with radio and cell phone reception. Being near them would certainly ding the value of real estate.

That would be nice. I remember, when I was in college, seeing a sign on one of those things that they have around the exits from libraries to keep people from walking off with the books. It assured library users that this thing did not emit radiation. I wonder how they suppressed its black-body radiation, not to mention how difficult and expensive it must have been to build it using materials completely free of radioactive isotopes… :wink: