Wherever I lay my tinfoil hat ...

Neil McIntosh has a great post concerning the recent hokum from Panorama on "the evils of wi-fi" (that phrase works better if you wave your hands above your head and wiggle your fingers, bogeyman-style) and how these scares are not a modern invention.

What is wrong with Panorama? Little wonder Ross Kemp on Gangs stole the BAFTA. MRSA and C.difficile are killing people and these guys focus on unproven dangers from radio waves? Counterfeit medicine, e.coli, even dodgy nursing homes, all kill more people than wi-fi (more in this case meaning more than any). So you've done it before? DO IT AGAIN. At least you'll be able to sleep at night.

The one UK broadcaster that doesn't depend on advertising fees and they need to scare lowest-common-denominator audiences with rubbish like this?

What is worse is that newspapers then pick up the scare story. The Daily Telegraph ran the story on its front page, if memory serves, under the headline: '"Wi-Fi risks in schools 'must be reviewed' ".

This article contained such gems as:
"Researchers working for the BBC's Panorama programme found the maximum signal strength one metre from a wi-fi-enabled laptop in a classroom in Norwich was three times that measured 100 metres away from a mobile phone mast nearby."

So the signal one metre from a laptop was higher than from a mobile phone mast 100 metres away? You don't say. How strong was the signal one metre from the mobile phone mast? Or 100 metres from the laptop? And was either signal proved dangerous by independent, peer-reviewed studies?

But this was Nobel-Prize stuff compared to the Daily Mail's The clasroom 'cancer risk' of wi-fi internet, where the figures were stripped out altogether:

'The demand [for a safety review] came after it was revealed that classroom "wi-fi" networks give off three times as much radiation as a typical mobile phone mast.'

Did the Telegraph or Mail print a correction, despite the BBC Trust putting Panorama's wi-fi story under the microsope? Not that I saw. And to add insult to injury, the wi-fi danger has now entered columnists' arsenals as a pseudo-fact. Rowan Pelling in The Telegraph writes:

'My siblings and I survived thrilling re-enactments of William Tell and airgun pellets in our buttocks, but would we have survived the microwaving of our brain cells from wi-fi and mobiles?'

Now I know Ms Pelling used to edit The Erotic Review, but surely having William Tell in your buttocks calls for some sort of child services intervention. That aside, maybe she should check the number of children killed or maimed by airgun pellets and crossbow bolts against those killed by mobile phones or wireless broadband, then ask which she would rather have pointed at her child's head.

And Julia Stephenson has a go in The Independent with:

'Two years ago I got Wi-Fi. It was convenient, as I could work anywhere in my flat. But within a few weeks [I] began to suffer from a lack of energy and insomnia, and had difficulty concentrating. Other factors could have caused this, but I suspected that the Wi-Fi had something to do with it, so I returned to fixed broadband. My symptoms disappeared.

Ta-daa! I too find wi-fi causes insomnia and lack of energy, but find it has more to do with looking for last week's Dr Who on alluc or, as of tonight, writing this blog.

For anyone who would like a thorough debunking of the Panorama story (or virtually any science story that appears in a newspaper that uses responsibility-dodging quotes in the headline), read Ben Godacre's excellent Bad Science column in The Guardian.

For anyone without the time to check these shoddy 'facts', try to remember that every time you flick a light switch, sit on the Tube, or just sit in your living room within 50 miles of a radio station, you are bombarded with electromagnetic radiation. And cosmic rays. If you're outside, you can add ultraviolet and infrared radiation to the spectrum.

Cue headlines reading: Sunlight can 'cause cancer'. Oh, wait ...