German Government works itself up into Wi-Fi panic
We must cleanse ourselves of this electrosmog
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Updated The German Government has told the country to avoid using Wi-Fi whenever possible, because of the possible risks to health, according to a report in UK newspaper The Independent on Sunday.
According to the newspaper, Germany's radiation protection body also suggests that citizens refrain from using mobile phones, and try to reduce their general exposure to "electrosmog" from other electrical devices.
Federal Office for Radiation Protection makes its recommendations on the basis that a possible risk has not been ruled out, rather than because an actual threat has been determined. It recommends avoiding exposure to Wi-Fi "because it is a new technology and all the research into its health effects has not yet been carried out", the IoS says.
The paper reports that the government made the statements in response to questioning from the Green party representatives in the Bundestag, the country's parliament.
The UK's Health Protection Agency had no comment on The Independent on Sunday's report, saying that its position remains as it ever was: that there is no consistent evidence to suggest that Wi-Fi poses a threat to health. Nevertheless, basic measurements should be done to determine what kind of exposures there are in schools and elsewhere, and as with every new technology, caution is the better part of valour.
Update: We're told that the parliamentary question and answer (here, as a pdf) is not quite as one might have expected from reading of the original article. Our German is rubbish, though, so anyone with better language skills than ours is warmly encouraged to read the pdf, and get in touch with us by the link above. ®
COMMENTS
Re: No Evidence eh?
This is nothing like BSE/CJD or tobacco/cancer. In those cases there was no evidence because people hadn't looked for it. In the case of EM radiation there have been people looking for evidence of a link to cancer and other diseases for many years and it simply has not been found.
And I'm not just talking about some piddly little WiFi or 3G signal here. People have been conducting studies on members of the armed forces exposed to much higher powers transmitted by radar and there is no evidence one way or the other - some studies have found *reduced* cancer rates in people with relatively high exposure levels.
@Christopher D'Souza. That pdf you link has this quote in the opening paragraph:
"Defence mechanisms have evolved by natural selection over countless millions of years of exposure to natural electromagnetic radiation, such as that from thunderstorms. They can often hide the underlying effects of man‐made fields so we do not always see them in our experiments. We therefore have to concentrate on the experiments that give positive results if we are to discover the mechanisms. In this context, negative findings (frequently published in work financed by the telecoms and power companies) have no meaning."
This is what's known as "cherry-picking" your data - it's something that real scientists don't do. I could go through the rest of document and brutally set about it with my two degrees in physics, but I'd probably fill up far too much space.
german gov wifi
the PQ bases its answer on a FOX NEWS reportage of a "Professor Lawrie Challis, head of the British research program on mobile telecommunication and health" Gesundheit" who recommends that children stay away form wifi base stations until further research is (financed ) carried out as to date his research has shown no links between wifi and health problems. www.mthr.org.uk
the said professor is responsible for the discovery that uk policemen suffer health problems if they use TETRA radios (they use them anyway and to my knowledge the streets of the UK are not littered with policemen with brains fried to death by their little TETRA handsets - and no other country's police force has suffered anything either...
No Evidence eh?
That'll be like there was no evidence that eating beef from BSE infected cows could give you CJD then. No evidence until they found it later.....
What a crap argument - we can't find any evidence that it is harmful, ergo it is safe.
So if a router weighs the same as a duck.........
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