Simcoe County school district in Ontario, Canada last year invested thousands of dollars on new wireless internet routers. As a result, students on a K-12 level have better access to the internet’s wealth of resources for their studies.
However, some of the district’s parents are immersed in a state of panic. They say the Wi-Fi is making their children sick. Simcoe resident Rodney Palmer, who has two children, 5 and 9 years old, bemoans, “Six months ago, parents started noticing their kids had chronic headaches, dizziness, insomnia, rashes and other neurological and cardiac symptoms when their kids came home from school.”
Palmer is going to pull his kids out of the schools to avoid exposing them to what he considers a toxic environment.
The only problem is that repeated studies have shown that the kinds of wireless signals used in consumer electronics are safe and pose no identifiable health risk. Michael First, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University in New York City and editor of the DSM-IV, the diagnostic handbook for psychologists, states, “As far as I’m aware, there is no evidence that any kind of radio frequency radiation (including cellphone towers, cellphones themselves,and also including Wi-Fi) cause any negative health effects.”
Strangely the public has shown little concern over TV or FM radios, which both offer a greater electromagnetic radiation than Wi-Fi routers.
Hysteria is contagious but, unfortunately, does not respond to simply removing all sources of offense, in this case RF, since there’s always some other imagined slight to sustain it.
Warning: those compact fluorescent bulbs you screw in to replace incandescent lights: they kill children, or make them gay.
But Canada doesn’t care.
I would not want to sit next to the antenna of the router. In fact if I’m next to my wireless N router I can feel the RF it makes me dizzy. Also my tracfone I.m never on it more than a few seconds at a time. Cellphones cause brain cancer. You should also stay away from aspartame and fluoride both are poisons
Silly tinfoil hat people. At least I wear an aluminum foil hat. It’s cheaper and works better.
Amateurs wear tinfoil hats. Those in the know wear a full body Faraday cage. Just don’t walk outside during a thunderstorm.
Haven’t these parents heard of puberty before? It can play havoc with your brain, your skin, and … and …
#3 time to up your meds.
sam said,
You should also stay away from aspartame and fluoride both are poisons
So is oxygen and lots of people die from overexposure to water so you should avoid those too…
wireless is bad mmmkay, so hang your dongle out the window via usb if you need to use it.
avoid close proximity to routers. and watch out cause those tin foil hats will only amplify signals..
ps flouride is bad, water is good.
EMF is bad at some levels, many people are reporting getting sick from new hybrid cars with waaaayyy to much loose emf..
govt will never publish true results of wifi as they are hounded by tel-co lobbyists.
and its not the heat or ionization factor or “sars”, but the specific wavelengths that disrupt our dna
the moon matrix is messing with my mind, i am seeing reality and it is bleak if we do not all wake up soon!
Let’s just turn the universe off
Seems fishy
Why couldnt they just drop ethernet?
I’m always amused by people who talk about proximity to radio transmitters etc. Being under them is actually the safest place. The radio waves form a pattern like butterfly wings.
As for WiFi in the home, funny how little people care about the GIGANTIC transmitter blasting the area with TV and Radio signals. Or the radiation coming out of TV’s etc etc.
Not to mention natural radioactive sources.
Oh, and avoid the outside. That big yellow blob blasts us fairly well also.
Run away! Run away!
@MikeN:
Drop ethernet for every desk? when some teachers can’t keep a desk layout from month to month?
We’re talking about education initiates that are trying (going) to put a netbook in every kid’s hands to eventually replace text and work books.
Aside from that, it costs roughly $500-600 to have an AP installed and that will cover a whole classroom. Vs that with $150-200 per ethernet, each ethernet drop only servicing 1 computer at a time. Add to that as I said before needing to run the drop to every desk, or any other place that the students would want to use the netbook.
As for “sitting next to the AP”, in my buildings all the APs are mounted to the ceiling, usually outside the actual classrooms (though that may change as we move from “thin” to “thick” coverage)
I live near two major cities that offer free public WiFi in the downtown areas, and have never heard of people complaining like that couple of quacks out in San Fran. The WiFi has been in place in schools now for going on 5 years in my area, and afaik not one person, student parent or teacher, has complained of RF issues like these folks.
I think people just want something to bitch about. If it wasn’t WiFi, it would be lack of it, or going back to saying the kids have headaches because of the florescent lights the schools use.
““Six months ago, parents started noticing their kids had chronic headaches, dizziness, insomnia, rashes and other neurological and cardiac symptoms when their kids came home from school.””
This sounds like the side effects of Adderall. At least that is what I got by googling the systems.
Weren’t the Soviets beaming microwave energy at the US Embassy in Moscow to power the hidden microphone in the Great Seal carving they “Gifted” to the Ambassador ? And didn’t the diplomats start turning up sick – for no apparent reason ? A connection ? – possibly …
For protection:
* Tinfoil hat
* Tinfoil shoes
* Copper wrist band
* Lead-lined underwear
* AM/FM Radio head phones (used for further instructions)
* Latex gloves
* Secret mantra. (I can’t tell you what it is or it wouldn’t be a secret)
I live in Innisfil, part of Simcoe County. This group of parents have started a propaganda campaign against WiFi in schools. They’ve been doing flyer drops for a while… I’m surprised any mainstream news source would pick this story up.
You can find their website here -> http://www.safeschool.ca
Most of these problems can be chalked up to kids not wanting to go to school. It’s amazing how their symptoms go away once they are home… obviously because there wasn’t any to begin with. It comes down to a bunch of kids faking sick to stay home, like kids do, and a bunch of parents being overprotective.
In the interest of full disclosure, we need to know how many of the kids showing “symptoms” have home wifi, cell phones, and/or cordless phones. Also Bluetooth mice/keyboards/headsets, such as the ones on PS3, or Xbox/Wii with wireless remotes.
And also, WHY IS THIS THE ONLY DISTRICT?
There are 20 or so districts in my prov, and not ONE case of “wifi sensitivity”.
I hope the guys talk about this on No Agenda
People have made these claims before and it has never stood up to experimental testing.
I would also like to know how they managed to measure the RF in the classrooms. Are these meters available at the source now?
Rico, I don’t think there is an educational benefit to having every child at a computer, unless it’s a class on computers. I am assuming a few connections per classroom. Even that I suspect is not a benefit over traditional luddite methods.
MikeN
look up 21c education. The times of a student a textbook, a pen and paper at a desk are almost over. for better or worse, education is going digital. It doesn’t matter if the public thinks a 1:1 computer:child ratio is good or not, the TEACHERS like it for many reasons.
For some subjects, I agree with the ideals. Obviously you don’t really need it for gym, even though products exist for examining performance much like the pro athletes use to find flaws.
The biggest idea behind the kids having ubiquitous access to tech is so the kids can get the skills to continue learning more than just the 830-330 a day.
We had a similar incident here in So. Cal. a year or so back. The city was gave a permit for a cell tower in a park across from an elementary school and the parents pitched a fit. The radio waves were harmful, cancer, blah, blah.
The funny part is the school has a very large commercial microwave relay station in the middle of the school yard. Far more RF from that than any cell tower.
People battle for the rights of children as if they are the same group from decade to decade. They do grow up.
It kills me how this is the same logic as those against vaccinations.
What is worse is when I was their ages I played on a concrete slab playground, had no seat belts in the car, wandered all day long from sunup to sundown during the summer with NO supervision, trick or treated around the neighbourhood and ate candy (with red dye 5 straight out of the bag, had most meals with butter and salt on pretty near everything and got cuts, abrasions and scratches and never used a triple antibiotic ointment or spray.
And wow! I’m still here with no major health issues and only take aspirin from time to time for a headache.
Go figure. Kids must be made more fragile than when I was young.
Cursor_
I thought Canadians were of average intelligence… I guess I was wrong.
The statement;
“As far as I’m aware, there is no evidence that any kind of radio frequency radiation (including cellphone towers, cellphones themselves,and also including Wi-Fi) cause any negative health effects.”
Is asinine as higher power RF radiation can and WILL cause serious problems. I know several examples from my military experience.
Speaking as a former high power radio transmitter tech.
#5 if you are wearing a full body Faraday cage you are completely safe. The current will flow through the cage to ground leaving you untouched…. Unless the current is so high it melts the cage, then you would be well done.
I am currently sitting at my desk writing this. There are two routers less than three feet away. A major cell tower is less than a block away. There are a number of power lines converging above the house where I live.
At the moment I am drinking a 32oz diet soda that contains both aspartame and ace-k. I just got done brushing my teeth and using a fluoride wash a little over an hour ago.
Yeah me…
#24 DHZ – Cell phone towers on school grounds are a huge issue in Tampa. If a school allows a tower only that particular school, not the school district, receives the cell tower rent money.
North American cell phone frequencies are in the 850 MHz and 1900 MHz bands. 802.11g, b and n use the 2.4GHz band. This is the same frequency as microwave ovens – a microwave oven maybe 2450 MHz (2.45 GHz) for instance. This is called the industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band. There are no long term studies that document the long term effects of low wattage exposure to these frequencies. I never could understand this.
Today’s children will have considerably more exposure at the 2.4 GHz frequencies then even today’s teenagers.