From ST Forum, 31st May 2007,
Widespread use of Wi-Fi raises health concerns
IN AIMING to make Singapore a wireless nation, has the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore commissioned any independent study into the health implications that such technology will bring?�Reports such as the following have me concerned:
# Sir William Stewart, chairman of Britain’s Health Protection Agency, is lobbying the authorities to investigate the health risks of Wi-Fi.
# The Austrian Medical Association is pushing for the government to ban the setting up of Wi-Fi in schools.
# In America, a school in Illinois was sued in 2003 for installing a Wi-Fi system. Parents claimed that the radiation was causing headaches and memory problems.
# Last year, Lakehead University in Ontario refused to set up a campus Wi-Fi system, citing possible health concerns.
As people do not have control over the deployment of Wi-Fi in public and even some private spaces, should we as a nation be so quick to embrace this new technology without first considering potential health setbacks?
Lau Chee Nien
I read this with interest, so I took a dive into the internet and dug up the following (correct me if my source or I am wrong):
-The main group of people complaining about negative impact of Wifi are those who claimed to have this condition known as “EMF sensitivity”, which was not scientifically proven or confirmed yet. Most of those with “EMF sensitivity” complain of mild discomfort (such as itch, feeling of pins and needles) near EMF sources. These discomfort does not equal to negative health impact (such as dieases, cancers, etc). Those with “EMF sensitivity” may very well be having psychological problems rather than any real condition.
-Television screens and computer screens also emits a very large amount of EMF.
-Handphones too, emies a large amount of EMF too.
I certainly await further letters from Lau calling for ban of TVs, Computers, Cell Phones, Radios and many more things over the next few days or weeks. (Just kidding)
Hell, Lau may even start complaining about the harmful EMF from the Sun, and ask the Singapore Government to considering banning it. (Still kidding)
While I certainly do not dismiss entirely the idea of EMF causing some negative health impact, such impacts are certainly minor, and technology should not be made to remain stagnant because of it.
 (No Ratings Yet) |
Loading ...
Loading ...
I am a skeptic of all this ‘cancerous EMF’ hoopla, but the thing is nobody is actually sure if Wifi, or handphone signal are really deadly. Most likely we’ll only know when this year’s generation of youth become 80+ yrs elderly.
Then again, I can’t imagine living without handphone and Wifi nowadays.
I have recently started a website (http://www.wifirisks.com) about wireless networks and whether they present risks to human health. I have not yet formed a settled opinion myself, and with vested interests on both sides of the debate I think we should all maintain a degree of scepticism.
However, it does seem that an increasing number of people are attributing symptoms (rightly or wrongly) to wi-fi and other EMF sources. Some of the news coverage is undermined by a poor grasp of scientific fundamentals, but that in itself underlines the need for more rigorous research and education in this area.
did a science project on effects of emr two years ago which eventually won a merit in SSEF. while i understand the the scientific experiment we carried out was on a small-scale basis and hold no bearing to the truth watsoever, we were surprised on the drastic negative impact emr has on organisms such as zebrafish (we observed under the microscope the severe degree of mutation caused by EMR). Our experimental results were supported by numerous acclaimed researchers on this field who have evidences on how EMR has led to, amongst many health effects, statiscally lower expectancy and higher infant mortality. I can send you our paper if you like.
While we recognize that there have not been any scientific evidences that EMR can led to negative health effects, it would be a fallacy to hence conclude that as such these effects are minimal. On the other hand, there are many reasons why these effects are not proven on human yet, as they were proven on numerous other organisms, among which includes the unfeasibility of conducting these experiments on human itself and the way EMR acts on organism, an accumulative prolonged effect which might impact not in three days but three years and is hard to detect. Also, we must recognise that because it is of commercial interest for many to prove that there are indeed negligible effects posed by EMR, many scientists are not objective in their investigations of EMR effects to start with, thereby damaging the credibility of researches conducted in general in these fields to start with.
Cognizant to the fact that technologies involving EMR are so ingrained into our lives to begin with, it would be absurd to ban products emitting EMR totally, as much as it would to make technology stagnant. However, if EMR is indeed harmful, an awareness by the general public of these health effects will not merely be useful, but ethical and necessary. In any case, we are not asking a halt on usage on all applicances involving EMR, but rather, to minimize EMR effects via methods such as material design and placement of applicances.
As a sidenote, you did mentioned about EMR effects from the Sun and a professor once told me that yes, if one is exposed to EMR from the sunrays too long he too will die eventually, just that because these EMR are negligible even to that emitted by applicances, its effects are not generally observed. On the other hand, there are reasons why many are suffering from diseases such as skin cancer these days.