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[IP] School district sued over WLAN radiation




Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Mon, 06 Oct 2003 16:40:48 -0700
From: Glenn Fleishman <glenn@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: School district sued over WLAN radiation
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>


Dave, I thought your readers would be interested in a lawsuit filed in Illinois by parents against a school district that has deployed wireless LANs (WLANs) extensively. The parents believe there is a preponderence of directly relevant scientific evidence that shows a direct connection between a large array of illnesses and conditions and the use of wireless systems of all kinds.

I've posted the lawsuit filing provided to me as a PDF at this link:

<http://wifinetnews.com/archives/002303.html>

Your readers can already find a variety of comments on both sides posted by people interested in the subject. I'm only aware of a few cell phones studies, and various US governmental bodies have set exposure guidelines for microwave radiation that I believe are quite conservative.

What I think is at work here, among other factors, is that there's a tendency of folks to believe that scientific studies are scientific studies. The filing I received doesn't include the citation mentioned in the filing so I can't check out the dozens of reports they reference. I assume that they're mostly or entirely not peer-reviewed.

There's also the physics problem: signal intensity varies with the inverse square of the distance from a transmitter, with lots of other detail thrown in there. The folks who filed this suit are writing as if the Wi-Fi transceivers were implanted in their children's eyeballs, not a few inches or feet or yards or hundreds of feet away.

I expect this lawsuit will spawn others.
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Glenn Fleishman, Unsolicited Pundit: read my work at http://glennf.com
check out my new book, The Wireless Networking Starter Kit, a guide to
Wi-Fi at home, office, and roaming : <http://wireless-starter-kit.com>
freelance reporter for The New York Times, Macworld, InfoWorld, et al.
read all the wireless networking news at <http://wi-fi.weblogger.com/>
Macintosh columnist, The Seattle Times  http://seattletimes.com/ptech/

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