WiFi At The Office?
Sunday, June 18. 2006
In a recent article in Computing,
Alasdair Philips, chairman of independent watchdog Powerwatch and a
member of the UK Government's Stakeholder Advisory Group on extremely
low frequency electromagnetic fields, shared the following:
"I’ve seen several doctors and dentists who have put wireless LANs
into their surgeries and then had complaints from staff who can feel
something in their head or can’t concentrate properly. But when
they’ve taken out WiFi and put cable in, the problem has disappeared."
"My advice would be not to put a wireless network into your offices. If
you’ve already got one, be aware of the symptoms some of your staff may
be suffering – things like headaches, fatigue, irritability and lack of
concentration,'" he said.
'If you see increasing numbers of those symptoms in particular staff,
it might be worth putting those staff in a different part of the
building with a wired network.’
He added that emissions are concentrated near the network's nodes, and
recommended locating access points away from where people sit at work.
My personal physician recently told me that he tried WiFi in his
office, but soon found that it gave him a severe headache, so removed it.
The common approach, unfortunately, is not to think much about how a new exposure may be harmful to health - until symptoms are experienced. If we followed The Precautionary Principle, we'd approach any new chemical, radiation exposure, etcetera, with extreme caution until we we were sure it was safe. As opposed to exposing ourselves until the results begin to prove that it is NOT safe.
This approach is of course encouraged by the industries (definitely including the military), that profit from whatever it is we are being exposed to. In a strange flipflop, harmed individuals are put in the position of needing to prove that what they were exposed to is harmful, rather than the perpetrater being demanded to show that it is not harmful.
Wheras industry has ample funding to hire clever lawyers and spokespersons, a harmed individual lacks the funding and skills needed to fight big industry and government. And, ironically, the more the individual is harmed, the less ability he has to take action at all.
Let's take a second look at the advice of placing further from exposure the office staff who are exhibiting symptoms. Well and good. However, what about the rest of the staff, who are not YET experiencing symptoms? Electromagnetic radiation causes CUMULATIVE damage to living bodies. Minimizing everyone's exposure as much as possible is the wise approach.
