Week 5 - Charles Miin
The world is full of electromagnetic radiation. This is because all light, from visible light that we see to UV, radio waves, x-rays, and so forth are all different wavelengths of light on the electromagnetic spectrum. Therefore, especially with the advent of the modern technological age, I can understand the position that Brian Spero and Camilla Rees are taking. That is, that the extreme use of electrical objects and machinery generates electromagnetic fields (EMF) which are able to disrupt the cell pathways of the human body and generate conditions for disease. While I am not ready to starkly refuse that, I find grave issues with this article and the assertions it stands to make, along with the key fundamental rules of scientific inquiry that it violates. To make statements as broad and absolute such as "We know for certain, it's absolutely unquestionable." on the basis of "20,000 studies" (1) is a statement that would require such a lengthy and thorough analysis that I believe it would take an entire institute of researchers years to validate it. If people such as Rees seek to inform communities about an issue that poses a risk to public health, rooted in science, she must endeavor to explain it in such terms and data. Other statements such as "Chronic illnesses have skyrocketed since the mid-1990s when this technology all started to proliferate." (1) violates one of the most basic scientific lines of reasoning: causation versus correlation. While I can reason that her assertion may bear some truth, and illnesses rose in the period of the 1990s, this could have been for an infinite number of reasons from changes in categories in regards to reporting to a wide range of societal changes in behavior and activity. To actually verify this, she would somehow need to control for all of the aspects of life in a sample of people reaching into the hundreds of thousands to really test and see if Wi-Fi signals and EMF were the actual cause of higher incidence of disease.
To truly begin to study this issue, you would need to find a large enough sample of willing participants, controlled for similar life activities and genetic pre-dispositions, separate them into areas of typical wireless activity and reduced or non-existent ones. Then conduct tests regularly over the course of years and observe if either population displays any trends. In realistic terms, you could sample any given metropolis and seek out populations living in more rural areas to begin to test this concept.
However, you may also want to consider areas in the world that radically stand to disprove this idea. Estonia, one of the Baltic countries, offers Wi-Fi across the nation as Eleanor Stanford reports for Mic. Though the country is reduced in size, it stands that Estonians are "blanketed" in Wi-Fi signals almost 24 hours a day which under Spero and Rees reasoning would be almost ensured death. However, Estonia stands with one of the highest qualities of life in the world despite this. It would be worth much consideration to see how these EMF affect these populations.
If the findings that Rees and Spero presents have any merit, why is there not an enormous increase in disease in Estonia where Wi-Fi is celebrated as the great equalizer and is more central to life than it is in the United States?
Works Cited:
Brian Spero. “Is Wi-Fi in Schools Safe?: Putting EMF Exposure on Your Radar of Potential
Health Risks.”
Stanford, Eleanor. "If You Live in This Country, You'll Have Free WiFi Access Everywhere You Go." Mic. Mic Network Inc., 25 Oct. 2015. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.
To truly begin to study this issue, you would need to find a large enough sample of willing participants, controlled for similar life activities and genetic pre-dispositions, separate them into areas of typical wireless activity and reduced or non-existent ones. Then conduct tests regularly over the course of years and observe if either population displays any trends. In realistic terms, you could sample any given metropolis and seek out populations living in more rural areas to begin to test this concept.
However, you may also want to consider areas in the world that radically stand to disprove this idea. Estonia, one of the Baltic countries, offers Wi-Fi across the nation as Eleanor Stanford reports for Mic. Though the country is reduced in size, it stands that Estonians are "blanketed" in Wi-Fi signals almost 24 hours a day which under Spero and Rees reasoning would be almost ensured death. However, Estonia stands with one of the highest qualities of life in the world despite this. It would be worth much consideration to see how these EMF affect these populations.
If the findings that Rees and Spero presents have any merit, why is there not an enormous increase in disease in Estonia where Wi-Fi is celebrated as the great equalizer and is more central to life than it is in the United States?
Works Cited:
Brian Spero. “Is Wi-Fi in Schools Safe?: Putting EMF Exposure on Your Radar of Potential
Health Risks.”
Stanford, Eleanor. "If You Live in This Country, You'll Have Free WiFi Access Everywhere You Go." Mic. Mic Network Inc., 25 Oct. 2015. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.
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