Go into a Starbucks, a hotel bar or an airport departure lounge
and you are bound to see people tapping away at their laptops,
invisibly connected to the internet. Visit friends, and you are likely
to be shown their newly installed system.
Lecture at a university and you'll find the students in your
audience tapping away, checking your assertions on the world wide web
almost as soon as you make them. And now the technology is spreading
like a Wi-Fi wildfire throughout Britain's primary and secondary
schools.
The technological explosion is even bigger than the mobile phone
explosion that preceded it. And, as with mobiles, it is being followed
by fears about its effect on health - particularly the health of
children. Recent research, which suggests that the worst fears about
mobiles are proving to be justified, only heightens concern about the
electronic soup in which we are increasingly spending our lives.
Now, as we report today, Sir William Stewart (pictured below
right), the man who has issued the most authoritative British warnings
about the hazards of mobiles, is becoming worried about the spread of
Wi-Fi. The chairman of the Health Protection Agency - and a former
chief scientific adviser to the Government - is privately pressing for
an official investigation of the risks it may pose.
Health concerns show no sign of slowing the wireless expansion. One in five of all adult Britons now
own a wireless-enabled laptop. There are 35,000 public hotspots where they can use them, usually at a price.
In the past 18 months 1.6 million Wi-Fi terminals have been sold
in Britain for use in homes, offices and a host of other buildings. By
some estimates, half of all primary schools and four fifths of all
secondary schools have installed them.
Whole cities are going wireless. First up is the genteel, almost
bucolic, burgh of Norwich, which has installed a network covering
almost the whole of its centre, spanning a 4km radius from City Hall.
It takes in key sites further away, including the University of East
Anglia and a local hospital, and will be expanded to take in rural
parts of the south of the county.
More than 200 small aerials were attached to lamp posts to create
the network, which anyone can use free for an hour. There is nothing to
stop the 1,000 people who use it each day logging off when their time
is up, and logging on again for another costless session.
"We wanted to see if something like this could be done," says Anne
Carey, the network's project manager. "People are using it and finding
it helpful. It is, I think, currently the largest network of its kind."
Not for much longer. Brighton plans to launch a city-wide network
next year, and Manchester is planning one covering over 400 square
miles, providing free access to 2.2 million people.
So far only a few, faint warnings have b
een raised, mainly by people who are so sensitised to the
electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobiles, their masts and Wi-Fi
that they become ill in its presence. The World Health Organisation
estimates that up to three out of every hundred people are
"electrosensitive" to some extent. But scientists and doctors - and
some European governments - are adding their voices to the alarm as it
becomes clear that the almost universal use of mobile phones may be
storing up medical catastrophe for the future.
A recent authoritative Finnish study has found that people who
have used mobiles for more than ten years are 40 per cent more likely
to get a brain tumour on the same side of the head as they hold their
handset; Swedish research suggests that the risk is almost four times
as great. And further research from Sweden claims that the radiation
kills off brain cells, which could lead to today's younger generation
going senile in their forties and fifties.
Professor Lawrie Challis, who heads the Government's official
mobile safety research, this year said that the mobile could turn out
to be "the cigarette of the 21st century".
There has been less concern about masts, as they emit very much
less radiation than mobile phones. But people living - or attending
schools - near them are consistently exposed and studies reveal a
worrying incidence of symptoms such as headaches, fatigue, nausea,
dizziness and memory problems. There is also some suggestion that there
may be an incre
ase in cancers and heart disease.
Wi-Fi systems essentially take small versions of these masts into
the home and classroom - they emit much the same kind of radiation.
Though virtually no research has been carried out, campaigners and some
scientists expect them to have similar ill-effects. They say that we
are all now living in a soup of electromagnetic radiation one billion
times stronger than the natural fields in which living cells have
developed over the last 3.8 billion years. This, they add, is bound to
cause trouble
Prof Leif Salford, of Lund University - who showed that the
radiation kills off brain cells - is also deeply worried about wi-fi's
addition to "electronic smog".
There is particular concern about children partly because they are
more vulnerable - as their skulls are thinner and their nervous systems
are still developing - and because they will be exposed to more of the
radiation during their lives.
The Austrian Medical Association is lobbying against the
deployment of Wi-Fi in schools. The authorities of the province of
Salzburg has already advised schools not to install it, and is now
considering a ban. Dr Gerd Oberfeld, Salzburg's head of environmental
health and medicine, says that the Wi-Fi is "dangerous" to sensitive
people and that "the number of people and the danger are both growing".
In Britain, Stowe School removed Wi-Fi from part of its premises
after a classics master, Michael Bevington - who had taught ther
e for 28 years - developed headaches and nausea as soon as it was
installed.
Ian Gibson, the MP for the newly wireless city Norwich is calling
for an official inquiry into the risks of Wi-Fi. The Professional
Association of Teachers is to write to Education Secretary Alan Johnson
this week to call for one.
Philip Parkin, the general secretary of the union, says; "I am
concerned that so many wireless networks are being installed in schools
and colleges without any understanding of the possible long-term
consequences.
"The proliferation of wireless networks could be having serious
implications for the health of some staff and pupils without the cause
being recognised."
But, he added, there are huge commercial pressures" which may be why there has not yet been "any significant action".
Guidelines that were ignored
The first Stewart Report, published in May 2000, produced a series
of sensible recommendations. They included: discouraging children from
using mobiles, and stopping the industry from promoting them to the
young; publicising the radiation levels of different handsets so that
customers could choose the lowest; making the erection of phone masts
subject to democratic control through the planning system; and stopping
the building of masts where the radiation "beam of greatest intensity"
fell on schools, unless the school and parents agreed.
The Government accepted most of these recommendations, but then,
as 'The Independ
ent on Sunday' has repeatedly pointed out, failed to implement them.
Probably, it has lost any chance to curb the use of mobiles by children
and teenagers. Since the first report, mobile use by the young has
doubled.
