Paranoid Parent: «Безопасен ли WiFi для ребенка?»

Disclaimer. This is very simplified explanation, mistakes are (mostly) intentional.

Radiation can be separated into two categories: ionizing radiation and non-ionizing radiation.

In layman terms, ionizing radiation is radiation that can "break" the molecules that make up things.

Non-ionizing radiation, on the other hand, just passes through objects or is converted to heat when it hits them.

Wi-Fi networks operate on the same frequency as a microwave oven: it uses non-ionizing radiation, when it hits the objects it is just converted into heat, it does not change the composition of the object itself. It is harmless, at most it will heat your body, but a very, very, veryyyy tiny amount that is not even measurable.

Ionizing radiation is dangerous. Examples of it are ultraviolet rays and nuclear radiation. It not only heats you but it changes the composition of the molecules that make up your body. They can modify the DNA on your cells, causing cancer.

Example: sunburns. It burns after long, unprotected exposure to the sun not because your skin got hot. The UV rays of the sun damaged the DNA of the skin cells, and the body reacts with the burning sensation.

Conclusion. Wi-Fi is harmless.

Perfectly safe.

The term "radiation" is often used to scare people. Let's get it straight. There's two factors - frequency and intensity. Frequency has a far larger effect on how damaging radiation is. WiFi and other radio communications use a very low frequency - far below visible light.

Radiation that actually causes issues, could potentially cause cancer, etc., is usually ionising radiation - they have a very high frequency and can cause mutations in DNA, possibly leading to cancer (more info on that process). The frequency required to be ionising? At least 1,000,000 GHz. That's literally a 500,000 times higher frequency than what WiFi transmits on, 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz. Non-ionising radiation, which WiFi falls under, does little more than transfer heat.

Did you know light is also EM radiation? Yup. In fact, light (~500,000 GHz on the near-infrared side, ~750,000 GHz near-ultraviolet) is much closer to ionising radiation than WiFi. Sunlight actually contains some ionising radiation (UVB, UVC - UVA can also cause DNA damage, but it's not in the same way). But you're not going to hide in your house for the rest of your life, are you?

Apart from frequency, there is intensity. Non-ionising radiation can also be damaging - but this really only applies to higher intensities. And ionising radiation is not always dangerous - our bodies can cope with lower intensities, which is why we don't all die in the sun (vampires are another matter...). WiFi has a transmit power usually far under 1 Watt (I've seen figures for 200 mW). And most of that energy never reaches you - by the inverse square law, you only get about 1/distance squared of that. In layman's terms - the energy spreads equally in all directions. 10 metres away? 1/100 * 200 mW = 2 mW. That's nothing.

Microwave ovens (which operate on a similar frequency as WiFi) transmit ~1000 Watts, and it's highly focused inside that metal box. Only maybe 1 W can be released through the shielding, and even that is considered perfectly safe. To put all this in perspective, sunlight (which is a higher frequency, and therefore more energetic) is about 1000 W per square metre when it hits the ground, half of which is visible light or higher.

You might also find some interesting sources and studies cited on a similar question on Skeptics.SE.

The source. I hope it helps.

The short answer is no.

The longer answer is that the intensity of a Wi-Fi signal is around is 100,000 times less than a microwave oven. The oven is a targeted device that operates at very high voltages and short distances. Wi-Fi routers operate at very low voltages, broadcast in all directions, and are used at relatively long distances.

If you are extremely fussy about Wi-Fi, then make sure you sit 1m (or more) away from the router, and don't use your laptop on your lap. Put it on a table or tray instead. I don't think there is a risk, but you may feel safer if you remove a non-existent risk.

Large resolution version

sources

Also check this out: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1178/are-wifi-waves-harmful

People have been flooded with transmissions for many years, WiFi, Radio, GPS, Mobile Data, Bluetooth, you are surrounded by signals, removing WiFi from your home wouldn't help, I'd recommend putting a Faraday cage up in place of your tinfoil hat. There has been no credible study as to any damage radio signals(which have been around for longer than my grandfather has been alive) cause to the human body, and even so WiFi is going to cause less damage than radiation from the sun, as someone who has been surrounded by WiFi since birth I can safely say that you've got more important things to worry about. Furthermore no credible studies have been done about WiFi that prove it more unhealthy than a standard microwave, your time might be better focused on baby proofing your home than shutting down APs.

You managed to survive all the time you spent sitting in front of a CRT screen didn't you? And those things make your lil' wifi box look feeble. Listen, if you don't stop worrying about everything that could possibly go wrong you're going to pass all your anxiety on to your children, and that's something that could actually harm them.

BTW: I hope you're not planning on driving them anywhere in a car. Those things are dangerous.

I'd note that microwaves (at roughly the same part of the spectrum as wifi) have been used for communication for ages, at significantly higher levels than what you'd use at home. Baby Monitors often use this frequency, and I haven't seen too much literature on the effects of these on children.

That said Princeton University has a policy statement on this which has a few interesting quotes.

One of the most noteworthy points is that the RF levels present in all locations were so low that the levels were close to the lower limit of detection of the RF survey equipment. The maximum spatially-averaged level measured was 10.9 Volts2/meter2, directly below an access point antenna. This measurement should be compared to NJDEP’s allowable limit of 20,000 Volts2/meter2, spatially averaged over the dimensions of the human body. The NJDEP limit does not differentiate between exposure of the general public and occupational exposure.

_

Another survey report is available online which provides the results of a survey performed at a school in Australia. The survey included RF field measurements of 22 Wireless Access Points with various transmit power levels and access mode configurations and in classrooms, meeting rooms and other open areas to measure ambient RF levels in the environment. The Hazard Survey concluded that “All measurements were found to be well below the general public reference level with the maximum reading measured from the wireless network of only 5% of the general public reference level. The maximum environmental reading was 0.0049% of the general public reference levels and the maximum reading when 10 cm from the school notebook computers was only 1% of the general public reference level.” Details of this survey can be found in the references at the end of this statement.

In short, there's so little RF radiation that its hard to detect, and far below levels that would cause an issue.

Most of this refers to 2.4 ghz signals - 5 ghz signals are shorter range and are attenuated at shorter ranges, so moving the AP would solve any concerns you have.

If all this doesn't convince you, consider tempest shielding the baby room.

The fact that 2.4 GHz radiation is not ionizing does not mean that it cannot damage some complex and delicate organic macromolecules. The stress that the electric field puts on them can induce degradation, see for instance B12 degradation in microwave ovens.

The wifi signal comes with a much smaller voltage with respect to a microwave oven and I tend to agree with people saying it is harmless. However there's probably no one on the Earth that can say that every single molecule and every single process in the human body in not harmed by such field, also because we do not know everything down there!

I am not suggesting to unplug all the wireless things (I would not do): if they have an effect, it is probably negligible, but the most rated question are a bit too categorical.

I realize this is not a real answer to your question, it's some sort of different point of view, but bear with me for a moment. Did you ever try to look at it from a practical point of view? Fact is: you are surrounded by "WiFi", it's not just your router. I'm not talking about your router, but all wireless communications going on all the time almost everywhere. Think about it, you neighbor has Wifi, your phone runs on "WiFi" (same microwaves, different frequency), and that's just the start, in fact the world is flooded in microwaves in all sort of frequencies. Just think about cell towers that cover huge areas with cell-phone traffic, you really think your WiFi router can even compare in terms of emissions with those towers?

Practically speaking, as much as you wish to protect your new-born, there's no way to protect him from this tech. The only realistic thing you can do is, how others said before me, avoid to stay near (a few meters away) direct sources of microwaves, like routers, phones and all things that work wireless.

That said, I saw studies made in Sweden claiming that talking on your cell phone (remember, same tech as WiFi) for prolonged periods of time altered the electric state of blood cells in the vessels that where directly near the phone's antenna. But that's the only study I heard of that had any evidence that microwaves could alter your body. However you could easily avoid this effect by using earphones while on the phone, because it only happened when the antenna was very near the blood vessel.

Some real sources

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mind-control-by-cell/

The researchers monitored the brainwaves of 120 healthy men and women while a Nokia 6110 cell phone—one of the most popular cell phones in the world—was strapped to their head. A computer controlled the phone's transmissions in a double-blind experimental design, which meant that neither the test subject nor researchers knew whether the cell phone was transmitting or idle while EEG data were collected. The data showed that when the cell phone was transmitting, the power of a characteristic brain-wave pattern called alpha waves in the person's brain was boosted significantly. The increased alpha wave activity was greatest in brain tissue directly beneath to the cell phone, strengthening the case that the phone was responsible for the observed effect.

...

If cell phone signals boost a person's alpha waves, does this nudge them subliminally into an altered state of consciousness or have any effect at all on the workings of their mind that can be observed in a person's behavior? In the second study, James Horne and colleagues at the Loughborough University Sleep Research Centre in England devised an experiment to test this question. The result was surprising. Not only could the cell phone signals alter a person's behavior during the call, the effects of the disrupted brain-wave patterns continued long after the phone was switched off.

"This was a completely unexpected finding," Horne told me. "We didn't suspect any effect on EEG [after switching off the phone]. We were interested in studying the effect of mobile phone signals on sleep itself." But it quickly became obvious to Horne and colleagues in preparing for the sleep-research experiments that some of the test subjects had difficulty falling asleep.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12881192

Effects of high-frequency electromagnetic fields on human EEG: a brain mapping study. Kramarenko AV, Tan U. Author information Abstract

Cell phones emitting pulsed high-frequency electromagnetic fields (EMF) may affect the human brain, but there are inconsistent results concerning their effects on electroencephalogram (EEG). We used a 16-channel telemetric electroencephalograph (ExpertTM), to record EEG changes during exposure of human skull to EMF emitted by a mobile phone. Spatial distribution of EMF was especially concentrated around the ipsilateral eye adjacent to the basal surface of the brain. Traditional EEG was full of noises during operation of a cellular phone. Using a telemetric electroencephalograph (ExpertTM) in awake subjects, all the noise was eliminated, and EEG showed interesting changes: after a period of 10-15 s there was no visible change, the spectrum median frequency increased in areas close to antenna; after 20-40 s, a slow-wave activity (2.5-6.0 Hz) appeared in the contralateral frontal and temporal areas. These slow waves lasting for about one second repeated every 15-20 s at the same recording electrodes. After turning off the mobile phone, slow-wave activity progressively disappeared; local changes such as increased median frequency decreased and disappeared after 15-20 min. We observed similar changes in children, but the slow-waves with higher amplitude appeared earlier in children (10-20 s) than adults, and their frequency was lower (1.0-2.5 Hz) with longer duration and shorter intervals. The results suggested that cellular phones may reversibly influence the human brain, inducing abnormal slow waves in EEG of awake persons.

And that after only searching for 5 minutes.

Most of the answers are correct regarding known facts about non-ionizing radiation. But I'll go personal here and advise to reconsider this as a father. You are better having a clean feeling about your child's safety without being superstitious.

Nevertheless I need to play a bit the devil's advocate

• Lyon, France, May 31, 2011 The WHO/International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B), based on an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer1, associated with wireless phone use. Note please read Volume 80 on non‐ionizing radiation (extremely low‐frequency electromagnetic fields). It notes a lot of reported side effects.

• Recent research: From a list with 34 papers mentioned in several portals

  1. 2013 - Immunohistopathologic demonstration of deleterious effects on growing rat testes of radiofrequency waves emitted from conventional Wi-Fi devices. Journal of Pediatric Urology

  2. 2013 Aynali G. Modulation of wireless (2.45 GHz)-induced oxidative toxicity in laryngotracheal mucosa of rat by melatonin. Eur Arch Otorhinolaryngol

  3. 2013 Havas M. and Marrongelle J. Replication of heart rate variability provocation study with 2.45GHz cordless phone confirms original findings. Electromagn Biol Med

  4. 2013 Margaritis L.H. Drosophila oogenesis as a bio-marker responding to EMF sources.

  5. 2013 Shahin S. 2.45 GHz Microwave Irradiation-Induced Oxidative Stress Affects Implantation or Pregnancy in Mice, Mus musculus. Appl Biochem Biotechnol

  6. 2012 Nazıroğlu M. 2.45-Gz wireless devices induce oxidative stress and proliferation through cytosolic Ca2+ influx in human leukemia cancer cells. International Journal of Radiation Biology

  7. 2012b Nazıroğlu M. Melatonin modulates wireless (2.45 GHz)-induced oxidative injury through TRPM2 and voltage gated Ca(2+) channels in brain and dorsal root ganglion in rat. Physiol Behav.

  8. 2012 Oksay T. et al. Protective effects of melatonin against oxidative injury in rat testis induced by wireless (2.45 GHz) devices. Andrologia

  9. 2011 Papageorgiou C. C. et al. Effects of Wi-Fi signals on the p300 component of event-related potentials during an auditory hayling task. Journal of Integrative Neuroscience

  10. 2011 Türker Y. Selenium and L-carnitine reduce oxidative stress in the heart of rat induced by 2.45-GHz radiation from wireless devices

  11. 2010 Havas M. et al., 2010. Provocation study using heart rate variability shows microwave radiation from 2.4GHz cordless phone affects autonomic nervous system. European Journal of Oncology Library Vol. 5

  12. 2010 Maganioti A. E. et al., 2010. Wi-Fi electromagnetic fields exert gender related alterations on EEG. 6th International Workshop on Biological Effects of Electromagnetic fields

More

• Martha R Herbert, PhD, MD in her letter Los Angeles Unified School District references a paper that contains 550 citations regarding this matter.

• There is also a lot of activity at schools about this matter. Some schools around the world are "banning" wifi (lmgtfy).

• Also it is said that plants don't grow near routers (google it, sounds more like a story)

I am not answering this to be the valid answer. I think that one is already given.