Wednesday, November 21, 2007

WiFi and all that

Readers of Crikey might have seen a series of rather sad comments flying between me and another Crikey contributor over the health effects of WiFi that one observer close to me referred to as like a pair of eight year olds arguing.

For the record the sequence started with a contribution to Crikey
about WiFi
, in response to which I submitted a contribution to Crikey's comments section.

This scored a response from the original author (which misspelt my name). I came back with a curtish reply which logically got another bite, this time accusing me of being a spin doctor and not revealing my identity.

By this time Crikey was getting sick of it but allowed me a last reply. They actually asked me to edit down my original submission which I did.

The bit I ommitted for space reasons was some further analysis of the work of The Bionitiative Group. This was in relation to one of the chapters of their study which had used studies of seamstresses to claim health effects from low magnetic fields. The research pointed out these fields came from both motors in sewing machines and transformers. This posed the obvious question that if we believe in this risk as well we should presumably be concerned about the tranformers driving the power supply of PCs, printers, scanners and modems far more than the WiFi.

We could of course be wrong, but as far as I can see we are still far better worrying about the number of people killed on roads than worrying about health effects that haven't been observed from some very old technologies.

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