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Now it's healthy, now it ain't
The Independent on Sunday has been plugging the perils of Wifi and phone radiation for weeks, with its growing tabloid-like propensity for not letting a sense of proportion get in the way of a sensational headline and a good scare story.
Its Wifi coverage, though it raised an important subject, has been way over the top. Now it has found a paper contradicting the recent reassuring report on the safety of mobile and cordless phones.
The new data (actually, a review of existing data) is based on small samples and it is hard from the figures provided to assess the real danger. If you double a very small risk, you still have a small risk. Incontrovertibly, we cannot know the long-term dangers because these technologies have not been around long enough to assess them. You can say the same of any new medicine or food additive, or even a fad like skateboarding.
As we have observed before, health authorities and design engineers can easily find common cause over this issue. Radio pollution is a danger to radio communication, leave alone health, and high transmit power drains handset batteries.
Femtocells (home mobile phone base stations) could reduce the need for high transmit power, particularly if they can be accessed by the public along the lines of the new BT-Fon deal. And Wifi vendors should pay more attention to limiting transmit power, and less to encouraging people to use their products as a poor substitute for cables rather than a complement to them.
Eek! I carry my DECT phone around with me! Seriously though it's no use saying "there's a risk" if you don't know how big it is; nearly everything in life carries a risk, however small.
Posted by JackH | October 13, 2007 10:52 AM