Wifi Worries.

[Jill9999]

Hi guys,

Just wanted some feedback/feelings from other ladies in a similar position, I've got a one year old boy and am becoming increasingly concerned about wifi around him and my iphone, I have some friends with older children who have got their own tablets and are hooked up to the house wifi all the time, but some things that my husbands friends have been hinting at recently have really worried me (one of them works in the wireless industry) so I started googling and found this study and web page:

generationzapped.com/trailer/

stopsmartmeters.org.uk/9th-grade-student-cress-wifi-experiment-attracts-international-attention/

My husbands friend used the tobacco industry as an analogy, apparently smoking used to been seen as healthy, doctors recommending it to people!!! Fact! It was a huge industry making billions (much bigger than it is now) the manufacturers suppressed studies that showed it was bad for health for ages until they couldn't hide it anymore but by then the health of many had been ruined beyond repair.

Wireless is a new technology, the industry makes trillions and apparently studies into the bad effects are being kept quiet, I love my iphone, would have it surgically implanted into my right hand if I could, but I waited so long for Charlie I just don't want to take any risks with him, am I being paranoid or healthily cautious? (first post so be kind )

Watch this then get back to me...

Wasn't that Panorama show panned for its bad science and being totally sensationalist?

I remember seeing an old documentary about television sets and how they could change our genetic make up! Scientists are pretty quiet on that front these days.

@ThaneOfScunthorpe I'm guessing you haven't watched it then?

@mawbroon I'm not worried about my mental health, if there was a problem my husband and friends would have said something by now believe me, but thank you for sharing your experiences and not ridiculing me like most on here.

@Thaneofscunthorpe, yes scientists would be pretty quiet on that these days as TV's today use completely different technology, LED, LCD and OLED not CRT.

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7122230.stm

So even the BBC accepts it was exaggerated and misleading.

Oh, blimey, was that the Panorama report from 2007? The one that was widely lambasted at the time for being utter horseshit?

I remember watching it at the time and my jaw almost hitting the floor over how much bollocks was being spouted in such a short period of time. Because I do know how wifi works (which is more than you do), I can tell the difference between wifi and mobile phones (which you apparently struggle with), and I do understand the difference between ionising and non-ionising radiation (something that appears to have escaped you entirely).

Interesting that even the BBC's own (generally benign) Editorial Complaints Unit upheld a number of complaints about the programme details here. For example that the programme "gave a misleading impression of the state of scientific opinion on the issue".

Ben Goldacre gave a good and highly readable account of the major problems with that programme here.

The interesting thing about this programme is that the individual they used as their source of (ahem) "expertise" on the subject was one Alasdair Philips. Mr Philips will, through his website powerwatch, sell you any number of dramatically over-priced "detectors" and hysterical "grounded bed sheets" to protect you from the signals that he says, without any justification, are dangerous. How nice of the man who puts so much effort into persuading you that wifi is dangerous to offer (for only £37.02!) a magnificent head net to protect you.

Is that really the best "evidence" you have for the supposed dangers of wifi?

@HowardTJMoon I don't think the word "horseshit" was used, but it was critisised for being unbalanced, having more experts on it saying "there are dangers" than ones saying that it's safe, and looking into the "it's safe" experts background showing he has industry links (which I think is totally relevant) but not doing the same with the other experts.

Christ you must really hate the Swedish government then, bunch of nutters hey!

@CorusKate, you said a lot there without actually giving any examples, question me and I'll elaborate?

"Get yourself a tinfoil hat", "maybe move to the country away from all modern evils and live in a bubble", "Outside is pretty good. I imagine caves are pretty insulated from Wifi, too." - Examples of ridicule, no?

Jill, it doesn't matter what any government does in a situation like this. You actually accept this point, although you may not realise it - otherwise, you would undoubtedly be swayed by the fact that most governments do not recognise electrosensitivity. Wouldn't you?

Anyway, as I say, government policies on things like this are largely irrelevant. What matters is what scientific studies show, and these studies repeatedly show that people with 'electrosensitivity' and related conditions are actually unaffected by whatever fields, energies etc they claim to be sensitive to. Instead, their symptoms kick in when they think the field/energy is operational.

Also, I think this is a good time to post a link to a well-known psychology paper by Dunning and Kruger:
gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/unskilled.html

badtime - love it.

OP - please go read some science books, available in any library. You are starting to get justified ridicule because you just won't listen.

As an aside I live in a small but non-isolated village and can only detect my own wi-fi network, due to non-connected elderly neighbours and thick stone walls in the house. So you can escape if you want. But please, don't move near me.

No, I used the word "horseshit" to describe the programme as it provides a vivid yet accurate summation of the broad consensus view of it at the time. If you prefer, The Register described it as a "travesty", The Guardian quoted the director of medical physics at Royal Berkshire hospital who called it "grossly unscientific", and Slashdot called it "scaremongering". I could go on.

If you don't understand why it was such horseshit I suggest you look into the inverse-square law as it pertains to radiated signals and consider why the apparent wifi signal level taken a couple of feet away from a laptop was higher than the 3G signal from a mobile phone past a couple of hundred metres away.

As for the Swedish Government's approach to electro-sensitivity, it was a side effect of the Swede's generally lenient approach to mental health issues (which is what all scientific testing has demonstrated it to be). As Ben Goldacre pointed out, even back in 2007 they were looking at scaling it back. I do suggest you read what Dr Goldacre wrote. He does cover the main problems very succinctly.

No, I didn't watch it but I read the Ben Goldacre report on it. I also think you need to learn a bit about science, OP. That's the problem with the internet, there are so many red herrings. It's like the aspartame debate, people just shout 'aspartame is evil' and link to websites like evilaspartame.org without actually looking into the actual science.

Incidentally, the Essex electrosensitivity research that was talked about in the Panorama programme turned out to reveal that (and I quote) IEI-EMF individuals are unable to detect the presence of rf-emf under double-blind conditions. (Eltiti, Wallace et al, 2007) Just like all the other research into the condition.

wifi is just radio waves isn't it? i.e lower frequency than both xrays and indeed visible light. Surely it is the higher frequency waves (eg xray) that would be more likely to cause DNA damage? Hence why wifi and radio waves are non-ionizing not ionizing which, for the OPs benefit, is a good thing not a bad thing as indicates they have less energy and aren't actually a form of radiation in the traditional sense (or did I dream the whole of A level Physics and Chemistry?)

I suppose there could be some mechanism we don't yet know about whereby low frequency EM waves could be causing cancer or illness - but I don't think I have seen any evidence for this.

Jill. I agree with what some others have said. If you are seriously considering huge lifestyle changes because of this then please get a good education behind you first. Learn the physics because you don't seem to understand what you are taking about. At least learn how to critique real scientific journals, not just the daily mail and tv documentaries (which we all know will find sensationalist stuff so they can sell their papers/ programmes).

Jill nobody realised I was ill until I was really, really ill. Relying on others noticing is not a good strategy!

Is this the only thing you are worrying about at this level?

Jill, I believe you when you say you started researching after this thread started. I've read some of the links. Sounds like that panorama programme was scary and a bit dodgy - I didn't see it but have read stuff by Ben Goldacre before and have a great deal of respect for him and his work.

Please don't worry too much. You've had some bad comments on this thread, and I hope you're not too hurt by them.

I don't think I am a particularly paranoid person, but when ds1 was diagnosed with multiple allergies (he reacts on skin contact to traces of foods on buses etc) I did get pretty stressed and weird for a while. Over time, I have learned to chill out and accept that I can't protect him from everything - even the danger of death! - and that I need to let him live a normal life among his friends. Obviously I try to minimise the risk of him coming into contact with the many things he is allergic to, but at some point I need to let go and let him get on with being a normal little boy.

I hope little Charlie can be a normal boy despite your fears. Seriously, you run the risk of making him stand out among his friends at school if you try to limit his wifi access. The risks are pretty small when you measure them against the risks of social exclusion and not being able to access the same modern world add his friends.

I am not a big fan of the"modern world" generally, and would ideally like to live on a smallholding growing all our own organic food etc. However, that's just not possible.

We are all in this together.

As I said before, the best you can do for little Charlie is to give him plenty of love, cuddles, healthy food and a good education. The rest of it is pretty much beyond your control so there's really no point in worrying about it. The risks of wifi are so small. ... Please don't worry!

@greenbananas Thank you so much for your input, caring not attacking.

Sorry I've not been on much recently, been so busy, and sorry for not providing any really concrete evidence to back up my fears, hopefully these 34 studies will suffice:

www.wakingtimes.com/2013/10/30/34-scientific-studies-showing-adverse-health-effects-wi-fi/

@mawbroon, Yes apart from the wifi thing (which I think is quite reasonable, see above studies) I'm fairly balanced, thank you though I do appreciate your concern...

There have been several people (well, I assume they're different people) coming onto mumsnet with similar fears yet they all tend to follow the same modus operandi.

They make wild claims based on flawed evidence but with inevitably at least one link to powerwatch.org or its ilk, ignore anything that anyone else says that isn't 100% supportive of their position, post up some links to other websites without comment, ignore any critical points that anyone makes, post up some more links to other websites without comment, lather rinse repeat...

Where's the debate? Where's the considered review of the evidence? I've looked at a couple of the latest round of posted links and considered going through them in detail but what's the point? I could spend an hour or two doing that and jill9999 will just ignore it all and, at best, just post up some more links to other websites without comment.

The last time this happened it was clear that the person posting the links to scientific papers hadn't even read them because at least a few stated exactly the opposite of what he/she was claiming. But after spending the time to condense the research conclusions into something readable and posting it up it was all ignored. As there is no indication that jill9999 has any interest in reading anything other than that which supports her conclusions I genuinely can't be arsed to do it again.

The one thing I would say after doing a quick review of a few of the papers that jill9999 has posted is that they tended to be curiously bereft of references to other papers or, more importantly, for other papers to refer to them (google scholar's good for this). This is in marked contrast to the sort of papers I've been wading through for my M.Sc although, admittedly, that is in a different field so maybe biological research works in a different way. My M.Sc tutors suggest that research that has few references should be viewed more cautiously than that with many references; again, though, maybe it works differently in biological research.