Will WiFi Kill Us All? | Life in "the Field"

Will WiFi and Cellular technology be the death of us all?  Or are we all in a tizzy for nothing?  I don’t know, I have no answers, but I do have some remarkable personal experience to share with you all.  We will begin this article with a story.

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I fondly recall my Grandfather scolding me for sitting too close to the Television one day.  This was before we realized that I needed eyeglasses, so I’d say that I was around 8 years old.

My grandfather was an engineer; an inventor.  He rarely ever bothered to correct my behavior when I was young, but when he ever endeavored to do so, there was generally a very good reason for it.

Also, he never ever played the “because I said so” card.  This was one reason I respected him as much as I did, as I was a precocious child, and never, ever obeyed commands without being on board with them.

I asked him why he thought it was bad to sit close to televisions, and he responded with a lesson.  He produced a mechanical pencil and some graph paper and taught me precisely how a television works.  In fact, he drew out a detailed schematic for our television model, which when later compared to an electronic diagram in Popular Mechanic turned out to be almost completely accurate.  And he drew this off the top of his head!

Common Sense
This is the sort of thing my grandfather called “common sense.”   See, there was no evidence at the time that prolonged exposure to microwaves would or could cause anyone physical damage.  He simply considered it “common sense” that allowing yourself to have cathode rays shot directly at your eyeballs for a few hours every day couldn’t be a good thing.

That was 30 years ago, and I can definitively attribute my own brand of “common sense” to him, and his patient and thorough lessons.  It is from him that I inherited my love for technology as well.  Not a week goes by where I don’t think to myself “Wow, I wish my Grandfather were still alive to see this” [bit of technology.]  He’d have been fascinated with the internet.  He’d be absolutely blown away with the iPhone, and the iPad.  Though as we all fall further and further into our obsession with always-connectedness, I often wonder how and where my grandfather would apply his “common sense.”

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A hotbed of microwave activity
My wife Pausha and I have recently started to become concerned about the long-term effects of living “in the field.”  We both work at home, which is great, but as we’re both technology professionals, we require constant connection to the internet to ply our trade.  We have 2 Airport routers in the house, 3 Apple computers, an Apple TV, 2 iPhones, an iPad, and one WiFi-enabled printer, and all of these devices are on, all day and all night long and communicating with each other over our network.

My God, our house is a hotbed of microwave activity!

Additionally, as a tech consultant, I visit clients’ homes and offices to help them fix their various technology issues, and so I’m exposed to all manner of contamination.

I work with 2 people who swear that their home WiFi network was causing them intense migraines.  In both cases, disabling the wireless routers and creating hard-wired networks alleviated their headaches.  This is evidence I’ve seen with my own eyes, and I don’t know either of these two people to exhibit hypochondriacal behavior, though I’ve not ruled out the possibility of the issue being completely in their heads.

So we started doing our own research.
If you’ve looked into this yourself, you’ve likely stumbled upon the work of Dr. George Carlo, http://www.whale.to/b/carlo_h.html who is an outspoken opponent of the cellular industry.  Dr. Carlo has connected cellular contamination with rising autism numbers, genetic and cell degeneration, and even links excessive radio waves to the plight of the honeybee, all of which is serious cause for alarm.

The quote which is often mis-attributed to Albert Einstein is no less powerful for his not having said it: “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.”

The search for answers leads only to more questions
For every bit of damning information, there’s an equal and opposite bit of published information denouncing the “electrosensitivity lobby” and the “charlatans” who earn a living through fear-mongering.  One particular site that ate 3 soild evenings of my life is Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science blog: http://www.badscience.net

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So who do we believe?
It’s really hard to say.  Without coming off as a conspiracy theorist at worst, or an incurable cynic at best, I always look at the profit motive.  I certainly do not trust the communications industry to do the right thing when it comes to public safety vs. earning enormous revenues.  I’m also a huge proponent of personal responsibility.  So Pausha and I continued our research.

Interestingly, we’ve found far more interesting information on this issue in European news channels than in American sources.  Pausha reads Polish news sites every morning, even as I read my own feed, and she’s turned up a bit of interesting research.

For example: The French Association of Health Safety Environment and Labour (Afsset) is calling for a dramatic reduction in the output of cell tower output, and have called for a moratorium of cell phones and cell phone towers near any school or government building where children under the age of 12 years old can be exposed.  And what’s amazing is that the French government is taking this very seriously.
Source: http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2009/05/26/vers-une-interdiction-du-telephone-portable-a-l-ecole_1198098_3244.html

I’m also seeing quite a bit of Polish, German, and Israeli research pointing to results finally coming in that show people living within 350 meters of a cell tower having 4 times more cancer than other city dwellers.

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My own personal punchline
We looked quite seriously at how we might do away with all of the wireless devices in our lives, and realized that to do so would require a very significant reorganization of our lives, our careers, our habits, and neither of us were really ready to move full-time up to that cabin in the mountains that we escape to as frequently as we can get away with.

So here’s what we do:

Every night when we’re getting ready to turn in, we turn off the cable modem, and both Wireless Routers.  We shut down all of the computers.  We shut down both iPhones, and we put the iPad on Airplane Mode, which turns off the device’s WiFi unit, but still allows me to read my books on it.

We figured that turning all of the “stuff” off around 11:30pm, and turning it back on at 9am the next morning would reduce our local exposure to our own microwave farm by roughly 40%.  That can’t be a bad thing right?  (Luckily, our house is also situated such that any WiFi networks owned by our neighbors don’t reach us.)

Now.. before you spend your breath reminding me that I’m being bombarded by microwaves all day long by nearby cell towers, and by radio towers broadcasting AM and FM bandwidth and even the SUN, check out what we’ve found.

I sleep through the night now.  Deeply.  I’ll say it again for the people in the back, and also for the search engines.

Since we began turning off our WiFi network and all of our wireless devices every night, I  sleep deeply at night,  every night.

I used to have a very hard time quieting my mind, because like my engineer grandfather, I’m always problem-solving, my mind is always working.

I’d taken up meditation to calm my mind.  I’ve taken up getting regular exercise, so that I’m more tired at night.  I’ve made major changes to my diet.  None of these things worked.  I would sometimes cross into insomniac territory, and work until 4 and 5am on nights when I’d have a particularly hard time of it.  There were some nights when I would even break down and take sleeping pills.

And then we turned off the WiFi, and I no longer have any trouble falling asleep at night, and remaining asleep until I’m ready to wake up in the morning.

I want to make it very very clear that I have no scientific data to support my claim.  I’ve not conducted controlled experiments, and frankly I don’t care too.  I have my own experience now, and I do admit that there might very well be some placebo effect going on here.  I wish there were a definitive “truth” here.   I hope that all parties will act with integrity and will put public health and safety concerns over industry profits, but until this resolves, we all have to be responsible for our health and well being.

I guess this is the sort of situation to which we shall simply have to apply some of my Grandfather’s brand of  “common sense.”