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Wireless "radiation" - a political matter, or a scientific question?

The current mast hysteria seems to have been sparked by an MP's decision to support a Welsh school in removing WiFi networking from a school. The phrase which broke the story was: "Parents with children at Ysgol Pantycelyn, Llandovery, warn there is not enough awareness about the possible dangers."

That story ran a week ago in the Western Mail. In one sense, I have to agree with it: there's certainly no shortage of ignorance. But that's not quite the same thing as "not enough awareness." If anything, there's far too much awareness of dangers, and not enough awareness of how small those dangers may be.

In a nutshell, anybody who is prepared to go for a walk in the sunshine without Factor 50 sunblock, is someone you can safely ignore when they start preaching about the dangers of mobile phones or WiFi. Even with sunblock, the Sun is at least hundreds of times more dangerous to you than any battery operated transmitter.

You wouldn't necessarily expect reporters who cover births, marriages and deaths for regional newspapers to have either the time, or the expertise, to compile a genuinely expert summary of the state of scientific knowledge about wireless. Heck, I wouldn't even claim that NewsWireless can do that. But too many factoids are creeping into the debate for comfort.

A factoid (originally, at least) was a statement which has been repeated often enough to be accepted widely as fact. One of the factoids which is most concerning about the "dangers of wireless" is the statement that the Health Protection Agency report on mobile phone radiation called for caution.

That's really not the case. What actually happened is that the HPA did its research, and failed to find any evidence that mobile phone radiation causes problems.

And its report was printed, and a press conference was held, at which - much to the bewilderment of HPA staff - the man who heads up the Agency responded to press questions, with the opinion (his own) that it was probably best to err on the side of caution, and that he would think that if there was a risk, it would probably be more likely to affect children, than adults. And this comment has been translated into: "Some experts believe children are more vulnerable to the radiation because of their thinner skulls and the fact their brains and nervous systems are still developing."

To this day, Sir William Stewart, the head of the old National Radiological Protection Board (now part of the HPA) has not explained where he got this idea from. Even the staff at the HPA have been unable to get him to reveal the source of his information, on which he bases that opinion.

Here's the key fact, in my view: Nobody will ever be able to say that there is no risk posed by wireless transmissions

If you want to find a zero risk activity, you're on the wrong planet. Wireless involves energy - as does bicycle riding, scuba diving, and cigarette smoking. Energy does things; sometimes more harmful, sometimes less so. What we can do, however, is rank risks in order, and if we do that, what we'll find is that one of the most harmful things you can do to yourself is ride a horse or a motorcycle, naked, in hot sun, while smoking.

On a scale of risk on which smoking scores 100 and eating refined sugar scores 1, sunbathing will be up there with the cigarettes and cigars. And mobile phone use will be invisible.

People have been trying, very hard, to measure the risk of mobile phone radiation, without success, ever since mobiles first appeared. They've failed to come up with a probability figure. It just doesn't register.

Does that mean mobiles and wireless are safe? No, it bloody doesn't! It simply means that if there is a risk, or if there is a mechanism of harm, we haven't found what it is. That means that tomorrow, some clever researcher may come up with an idea that says: "Perhaps if we test this, we'll find a damage mechanism!" and when they test this idea, it will show a finite risk. Perhaps, if we try these tests for three generations, we'll find some cumulative deterioration. Possibly, if we came up with the right tests, we will find that there's a way in which the risk can be measured.

But today, we don't have a figure for the risk. And here's the crux of the matter: the lower the risk actually is, the longer it will take before it can be measured

Until we know what the risk actually is, it remains a possibility that it's higher than we realise. But the problem is: even if the risk is actually zero, the chance that it is real will remain a possibility for ever, because until you've tested every possibility, you can't rule out the notion that one day, you may think of something which shows that there really is a risk.

One thing we don't need to speculate about: anxiety is bad for your health. If the only way of alleviating anxiety is to disable a network, then disabling the network will be better for your health.

I have a good friend who is made anxious by staircases. Stairwells are, for her, enclosed spaces, which cause her pulse to rise, her blood pressure to increase, and her autonomic nervous system to inject powerful chemicals into her bloodstream, causing measurable damage to her health. Does this mean that you and I should worry about staircases?

The way to find out what the risks of microwave radiation may be, is long-term, epidemiological statistics. We have had microwave radiation in our society for half a century, without finding any sign that low-level signals pose a risk.

If you think you have found a "scientist" who has actually proved a statistical link between microwave radiation and disease in people who own mobile phones, then there are people who would love to hear from you and from that scientist. Proving such a link would make you (and the scientist) famous, almost to Nobel level. You would be a hero on a global scale.

In the absence of long-term statistical trends, what would do instead?

Easy. All you have to do is discover someone who can actually say, repeatably, that "the wireless device is switched on" when it is switched on, and "it's switched off" when it's switched off.

In theory, this should have been done by now. The literature is full of anecdotes of people claiming the most horrible symptoms "caused by wireless" and many of them are quite positive that "when I leave the area of the wireless, I feel fine!"

If they are not deluding themselves, then all we need is to set up a simple experiment. They sit in the room, and the experimenter switches the wireless on, and they say: "It's on!" and we've proved that they can detect it.

Nobody has yet managed to do this. They've tried! - and every time the test is done, it seems that the victims lose their previously reliable ability to detect radio waves. In the circumstances, those of us who feel that the anxiety level is already too high, will find nothing to make us worry. And those who, nonetheless, try to increase the level of anxiety that the ignorant feel, will appear to us to be alarmist rabble-rousers, quite possibly out to make a reputation for political purposes.