WHO Factsheets on the Risks of Wi-Fi Radiation
September 3rd, 2008 by Stephen
A while back I wrote on a wave of Wi-Fi hysteria in the media. Since then the agitators have gone quiet, but I have been asked more than once for authorative guidance on the subject, so I am linking here the WHO factsheets on the issue.
WHO Factsheet on Electromagnetic fields and public health – Base stations and wireless technologies
WHO Factsheet on Electromagnetic fields and public health – Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity
i’m sorry – the pages from the who appear to have been created in 2005 – round about the time when i first discovered i suffered with hypersensitivity to blue tooth, some mobile phones,wifi and dect phones.
i wouldnt call it hysteria – i just want a solution.
please can you explain why recent studies have discovered that mobile phones can affect you sleep patterns?
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-wellbeing/health-news/mobile-phone-radiation-wrecks-your-sleep-771262.html
also why are children advised not to use mobile phones. why are people advised not to use mobile phones for calls lasting more than 5 minutes.
your statements dont offer any satisfactory conclusions
I would call it hysteria because the reporting was being led by a pressure group in ignorance of the evidence.
As the WHO fact sheet shows (and even the study you cite reaffirms) the symptoms you suffer, whilst very real, cannot be correlated with exposure to electromagnetic radiation. There is likely to be some other cause instead.
Looking at the paper you cite (actually here: The Effects of 884 MHz GSM Wireless Communication Signals on Self-reported Symptom and Sleep (EEG)- An Experimental Provocation Study), I notice the following:
“Participants were not able to di?erentiate RF exposure conditions from sham exposures more often than would have been expected by statistical chance alone. Neither were there any statistically signi?cant di?erences between the SG and NG in reliable detecting results.”
Which is what the WHO fact sheets make clear (the base station one is actually a 2006 creation btw, but both are actively maintained).
So what does this paper actually say?
Particpants who were exposed to an unusually high dose of radiation for an extended duration in a very small study demonstrated a propensity to take a significantly longer time to get to sleep.
Of course, in *any* study, a “significant” result will be obtained by chance in one study in 20. A small study is more likely to yield a significant result than a large study, and thus it is entirely unclear that this study would reproduce the results in follow up work. It has also been pointed out that the reduced sleep was not under normal conditions but laboratory ones, and not following natural patterns of waking or sleeping and the radio frequency exposure was “consistent with worst case exposure occurring in real-life situations, but with extended duration”. Therefore, the exposures are not directly comparable with real life situations.
So despite the rather poor way this kind of thing gets reported in the press, these results are far from conclusive about the one point they make, and actually lend credence to the WHO fact sheet that people claiming electro hypersensitivity cannot in fact detect whether they are subjected to the radiation or not in controlled laboratory conditions.
Why are children advised not to use mobile phones? Well partly because their skulls are thinner, and the radiation can penetrate and cause a slight warming in the brain. There is no proof that this is harmful to them, but it is precautionary.
Although a far better reason is that children walking along talking on a mobile phone are much more likely to get mugged or run over than children who do not!
And in any case, my article was about wireless access points, not mobile phones. Access points are run at much lower power (quite deliberately, so that you do not interfere with your neighbours too much) and as such have a completely insignificant warming efefct, even if you strap the thing to your head! And as most access points are significantly further away, and the effect of the field decreases by the square of its distance, I stand by the points I have made. Hysteria of WiFi access points in the media is made in *complete* defiance of the actual facts of the matter.
Just about every electronic device gives off some kinda of electronic radiation. But here is the thing… if somehow scientists figured out that computers gave off radiation that was deadly and reduced people’s lives by x amount of years, what would the world do? I mean after all we are technology inclined and my guess is we probably would not abandon the use of computers.
It’s like what if we found out that when we got in our cars our lives was reduced by x amount of days, would the world give up on cars all together?
Actually they give of electromagnetic radiation. Very true. But of course, we are surrounded by electromagnetic radiation in any case. We rely on it to see. We need it to make vitamins in our body. It prevents us from freezing. etc. etc.
And dealing with hypotheticals leads to sloppy thinking. My computer gives of a large amount of electromagnetic radiation from its screen. This radiation is not harmful. It is what we usually call “light” and I use it to see.