Is Wi-Fi Bad For Your Health?

A BBC television show has found elevated levels of radiation in a school using Wi-Fi, prompting a debate about the safety of wi-fi. But is it all just hype?

We all know the benefits of Wi-Fi broadband – the ability to check your e-mail in a hotspot or use your laptop anywhere at home, for instance – but a British television program hascontended that Wi-Fi could be dangerous to your health. But is it all a storm in a teacup?   The BBC Panorama showtested radiation levels in English one school equipped with Wi-Fi and found them to be three times that of radiation emitted by cell phone masts. That’s prompted a debate about the long-termsafety of Wi-Fi, although it’s still 600 times lower that the radiation safety levels issued by the British government.   Wi-Fi uses low intensity radio waves, whose wavelengths aresimilar to those found in microwave ovens, although 100,000 times less intense.   While Sir William Stewart, head of the Health Protection Agency, said thatthere should be a review of the long-term effects of wi-fi, his own agency has calculated that you’d need to sit in a Wi-Fi hotspot for a year to receive the same dose of radio waves thatyou’d absorb for a 20-minute cell phone call.   To date, there is no indication that low-level exposure causes any short or long-term damage to tissue, and Professor Lawrie Challis,chairman of the Mobile Telecommunication and Health Research program management committee, noted that “Wi-Fi exposures are usually very small – thetransmitters are low power and some distance from the body.”   He did, however, advise that as safety precautions, children should not make long calls on cell phones, and that they shouldrest laptops on tables, rather than on their laps.   The debate continues.