Teachers’ Union Moves To Quash Wifi

Hmm. A teachers’ union moves to quash wifi in schools here in Ontario. They have come out strongly against the deployment of more wifi at Catholic schools across the province.

Why you ask?

Shoddy security? Rogue access points?

Nope. Health risks. Huh? This again?

From CBC:

In a position paper released on Monday, the union — which represents 45,000 teachers — cites research by the World Health Organization.

Last year the global health agency warned about a possible link between radiation from wireless devices such as cellphones and cancer.

Some believe wireless access to the Internet could pose similar risks.

Yes, they spoke about cell phones primarily. I find it interesting that this debate continues despite a lack of empirical evidence. As far back as 2007 we find this article on the BBC about the dangers of wifi being unproven.

This is not to say that I would discount this out of hand but rather, where is the evidence?

Now, if we have a look at the research by the World Health Organization in 2006 we see this,

A common concern about base station and local wireless network antennas relates to the possible long-term health effects that whole-body exposure to the RF signals may have. To date, the only health effect from RF fields identified in scientific reviews has been related to an increase in body temperature (> 1 °C) from exposure at very high field intensity found only in certain industrial facilities, such as RF heaters. The levels of RF exposure from base stations and wireless networks are so low that the temperature increases are insignificant and do not affect human health.

So, where did the school board get their information from? If there is evidence to support this? If so, I’ll be first guy to hard wire my house.

Also,

Recent surveys have indicated that RF exposures from base stations and wireless technologies in publicly accessible areas (including schools and hospitals) are normally thousands of times below international standards.

Here is the OECTA Wireless position paper (.pdf). I found this passage from the report rather interesting,

There are reports of a number of immediate biological effects that are experienced with exposure, such as; headaches, nausea, dizziness, difficulty concentrating, weakness, pressure in the head, and a racing or fluttering heart (tachycardia). Moreover, students are considered to be more susceptible to microwave radiation because of their age and their earlier stages of development

Based entirely on…reports? So, hearsay with no link to any research. Gotcha. It appears that there is nothing to support this paper. This all came to a head 8 months ago when WHO revised their position on Wifi and the Council of Europe discussed a similar ban. However, that appears to have withered and died on the vine as the “Document doesn’t exist”.

You know, I would have no problem admitting if I’m wrong. Just the facts ma’am. It would be nice if they had taken the time to review a long term study. If only there was one we could find.

Will cameras be banned next for stealing souls?

Source: Article Link

UPDATE: Thanks to some folks on Twitter I was able to gather some more resources on this subject. Namely a Danish study “Use of mobile phones and risk of brain tumours“, courtesy of Scott Francis, which studied 350K users and found no discernible threat.

Conclusions In this update of a large nationwide cohort study of mobile phone use, there were no increased risks of tumours of the central nervous system, providing little evidence for a causal association.

Also, we find that some of the research that was cited by the OECTA paper…doesn’t even exist.

Just one problem: this quote doesn’t exist outside of this policy statement. No part of the cited report deals with electromagnetic sensitivity at all, and doesn’t mention Wi-Fi at all either. I spoke with Jungwee Park, the Statscan researcher who wrote the cited report, this morning. He said that the dataset they were using in this 2007 paper was looking specifically at Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and MCS. Since the dataset was from 2003, there’s simply no possiblity of him offering a formal statement on it. He did say that if OECTA is presenting this as a direct quotation, “I would like to raise some questions because that sentence is not from our report.”

Facepalm. Thanks to David Harvey for that one.

(Image used under CC from country_boy_shane)