Once again, I have to respond to a fallacious letter to the editor in my local paper, the Flamborough Review. And once again, it’s by the same guy. This is the third of his letters I’ve responded to; the first was about teachers and the second was about vaccination. Here is the letter in its entirety:

The  idea of  “learning commons” in children’s libraries is a noble idea, although I am not an advocate of this kind of technology in primary schools.

We are distancing our children so far from the fundamentals that they will no longer have a foundation to build on.

Reading, writing, arithmetic and spelling has gone the way of the dodo. As a parent I am concerned, as are many others, that technology is beginning to replace the fundamentals. I can see it in the work my daughter brings home, and the work she doesn’t bring home.

Another concern is the use of Wi-Fi in primary schools. Our children’s exposure to electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) is a cause for worry. According to Dr. David Carpenter, director of the Institute of Health and Environment at the University of Albany, there is a great body of work that shows continued exposure to EMF effects changes in the ability to learn and remember. Last fall, the World Health Organization could no longer afford to ignore the research and deemed EMF to be a Class 2 carcinogen. The list of Class 2 materials also includes items such as asbestos, lead and diesel fumes. I am certain I would not send my child to a room full of diesel fumes, so how can I consciously send her to a room full of harmful radiation?

In 2011, biologist Andrew Goldsworthy gave a witness statement to a standing committee on health regarding the dangers of EMF. One of the most horrific statements from his speech was, “it was first shown by Bawin et. al in the ‘70s that weak amplitude radio waves can remove calcium from brain cell membranes. This destabilizes them, making them more likely to leak. This is important in the brain because the normal function of brain cells depends on the controlled passage of specific ions through the membranes. When they leak, ions flow uncontrollably…When this occurs in a fetus or young child, it retards brain development…Wi-Fi should be considered an impediment rather than an aid to learning and should be avoided, especially by pregnant teachers.”

The very governments and agencies mandated to protect us allow this kind of harmful technology to exist. We need to reduce or eliminate our exposure to as many toxins as we can, for our own health, and that of our children.

There is a parents’ group in Collingwood trying to get Wi-Fi out of their schools, yet officials are siding with Health Canada, which is ignoring its own scientific data. Please go to safe school.ca and read up on this issue. Some of the evidenced side effects include nausea, headaches, dizziness, attention and focusing problems, low blood counts, disturbance of the immune system and heart palpitations and racing heartbeats.

I will be asking the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board for the results of their testing to see what levels my child is being exposed to.

Kevin Inglehart, Lynden

My only comment on the opening bit about education is that my sons are in grades 9 and 6, all in the Hamilton public system, and they are certainly learning the fundamentals as well as technology. They certainly learn things differently than I did thirty years ago, but that’s to be expected. Perhaps this is a problem with the particular school or his daughter’s teacher. It could also be a problem with his expectations and not with the school board at all.

But onto the other issue he raises, that of wi-fi routers causing health problems. This time, I’m not going to write a letter to the editor in rebuttal of this. I’m going to write my rebuttal here rather than submitting it to the Review. Submitting it would require making it fit for general consumption, and so I’d have to refrain from the sarcasm and ridicule that I really feel like using. I’d also have to shorten it since I’ll probably write a lot here and the Review won’t print it if it’s too long. Quite honestly, I just can’t be bothered to clean it up and make it short. Writing concisely is much more difficult than just spouting off; in the words of Blaise Pascal, “I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”

So, to business. First off, the EM radiation given off by a wi-fi router is called “non-ionizing” radiation, which means that it’s not strong enough to remove electrons from atoms. This also means that it does not cause damage to cells. This is in contrast to ionizing forms of radiation, such as X-rays and UV rays, which do cause cell damage. Some forms of non-ionizing radiation (like microwaves) can heat things up and the heat can cause damage, but wi-fi signals are just not strong enough even for that.

It’s true that electromagnetic radiation is considered a class 2B carcinogen by the World Health Organization (WHO). All that means is that it’s on a list of things that have not been shown to be carcinogenic but require further study. Ken Foster, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, says:

Saying that something is a ‘possible carcinogen’ is a bit like saying someone is a ‘possible shoplifter’ because he was in the store when the watch was stolen. [reference]

Here are some other things that are on the same “Class 2B carcinogen” list (the entire list is here):

• coffee
• asphalt
• nickel
• pickled vegetables
• carpentry and joinery
• chroloprene (also known as Neoprene, a synthetic rubber used in hundreds of products including clothing)
• aloe vera
• gingko biloba extract
• talc-based body powder

Presumably Mr. Inglehart will be petitioning the school board to move the local Tim Horton’s further away from the schools, to remove wood shop entirely, and to ban pickles from student lunches.

Asbestos and diesel exhaust, which Mr. Inglehart claims are on the type 2 list, are actually type 1. (Diesel fuel is 2B.) Lead is on the 2B list, but lead is known for being a neurotoxin, not a carcinogen.

I did visit the web site Mr. Inglehart suggested, and found many anecdotes describing how people became sick when they installed wifi routers in their home or school. But as we all know (don’t we?), such anecdotes are scientifically meaningless. (One famous skeptical quote is “The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’.”) There were also some studies that showed a possible association between cancer and cell phone towers – note that this is “possible association” not “proven causality”, and a cell phone tower is not the same thing as a wifi router.

It comes down to this: unless you are a biophysicist specializing in this kind of research, you have to read what others have done and then trust someone. I haven’t done the research myself, and I probably couldn’t understand the details of the studies if you put them in front of me. But I do trust the World Health Organization, who says (emphasis mine):

In the area of biological effects and medical applications of non-ionizing radiation approximately 25,000 articles have been published over the past 30 years. … Based on a recent in-depth review of the scientific literature, the WHO concluded that current evidence does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields. [reference]

The Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion says

After a decade of additional research, there is still no conclusive evidence of adverse effects on health at exposure levels below current Canadian guidelines.

and

…there is no plausible evidence that would indicate current public exposures to Wi-Fi are causing adverse effects on health. [reference]

Just like a lot of other conspiracy theories, this one is based on bad data, bad assumptions, and mistrust of the scientific community. Then you wrap it all up with scary words like “carcinogen” and stories about people getting sick, and give it to parents while implying that if they don’t do anything about it, they obviously don’t care about their children’s health. If you do that, you might be able to convince parents that this is a real problem. That’s why we have school boards considering getting rid of wi-fi, not because it’s actually a problem.

I’ve seen a number of other letters to the Review from this same person. The majority of them are filled with fear-mongering and conspiracies like the “dangers” of vaccines and water fluoridation and that “banks and large corporations own and control the media“. Most of them are just opinions and have no references, but some of them, like this one, have references to one or two articles or scientists who happen to disagree with just about every other scientist in the world. It’s possible that he accidentally stumbled upon an article that describes the exact opposite of the scientific consensus and believed it wholeheartedly. But it seems unlikely that he’s done this several times, so I am forced to assume that he simply mistrusts science and government, and believes in any conspiracy theory he hears.

I find it partially amusing but mostly irritating that these conspiracy believers (and many alt-medicine believers too) are all “mainstream science is wrong” and “mainstream science is covering up the truth” until they find a scientist who supports them, and then they’re all “this person believes us and he’s a scientist so he knows what he’s talking about and you can trust him! And not all those other scientists! Just this one!” Sorry, folks, you can’t have it both ways. Either you trust the scientists (or more accurately, the science) or you don’t.

Update: I did end up writing a letter to the editor. Here it is:

I feel compelled to respond to Mr. Inglehart’s letter, which contains half-truths and misleading statements, so that other parents don’t concern themselves with a problem that does not exist. Wi-fi routers in our schools are not a cause for concern. There are certainly people who believe that they are, including a few scientists, but the vast majority of studies that have been done have shown no negative effects on health at all.

It’s true that electromagnetic radiation is considered a class 2B carcinogen by the World Health Organization (WHO). What that actually means is that it’s on a list of things that have not been shown to be carcinogenic but require further study. Other items on this list include coffee, asphalt, pickled vegetables, carpentry and joinery, aloe vera, and talc-based body powder. I don’t hear anyone leading the charge against wood shop or pickles in school lunches.

But if you’re going to believe the WHO’s “possible carcinogen” list, you should really believe the WHO when they say “In the area of biological effects and medical applications of non-ionizing radiation approximately 25,000 articles have been published over the past 30 years. … Based on a recent in-depth review of the scientific literature, the WHO concluded that current evidence does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields.”

More locally, the Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion says “After a decade of additional research, there is still no conclusive evidence of adverse effects on health at exposure levels below current Canadian guidelines. …there is no plausible evidence that would indicate current public exposures to Wi-Fi are causing adverse effects on health.”

There is no point is spending more taxpayer money looking at something that has been studied this much when the overwhelming majority of the studies show the same thing – that there are no negative health effects caused by wi-fi signals.

Graeme Perrow
Waterdown

I’ve been seeing more and more articles and blog postings like this one recently, all about “detoxifying” your home or your life or your body. They all talk about these vague “toxins” generally but never say what toxins. Then they talk about some of the dangers to society and how to either avoid or fix them but most of the time, the “dangers” aren’t actually dangerous and the “solutions” are either non-existent, ineffective because they don’t work, or ineffective because there’s no problem to solve in the first place.

The author of this story has a son who was diagnosed with autism and says that our “toxic” environment is the cause for her son’s illness. (Somewhat surprisingly, she makes no mention of vaccines.) She then describes ways to “de-toxify” your life. She certainly makes some good points in the article – drink water instead of other stuff, eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, avoid processed snacks, eat rice crackers or veggie chips, go to farmers markets, these are all great suggestions. But here are some of the points she makes that directly contradict modern science and medicine:

The world in which our children are currently growing up, is significantly more toxic than the one in which we did as children, exponentially more so than our parents.

Really? How do you figure? We and our parents lived through lead (in the pipes, paint, toys, etc.), asbestos, DDT, Thalidomide, and other actual toxins, all of which are now known to cause no end of health problems. Specifically what toxins are you talking about that are significantly or exponentially worse than those?

We know organic is best. Food dyes and colors make our kids wild. GMOs are terrifying. Gluten, soy, corn, and dairy are the high allergens and can cause all sorts of issues. Juice is unnecessary sugar and calories.

Nope, probably not, nope, nope (provisionally), OK. Organic food is no healthier or safer than non-organic (See references 1, 2). I did read about a study that food dyes may cause hyperactivity in children, but the FDA in the US has thus far declared that “a causal relationship between exposure to color additives and hyperactivity in children in the general population has not been established” (3). GMO food is no less healthy or safe than non-GMO (4). If you have Celiac disease, gluten is certainly something you want to avoid. But if you don’t, it’s harmless (5). Soy, corn, and dairy are indeed allergens and can cause all kinds of problems if you are allergic. But I could find no articles indicating that they’re a problem if you are not allergic. (6). The juice one I’d agree with.

Allopathic medicine is a term coined by Samuel Hahnemann, the father of Homeopathy, in reference to ‘mainstream Western medicine’. In simple terms, it refers to our constant need to address and suppress every symptom our body sends us of illness.

“Western medicine just treats the symptoms” is a common misconception in the alternative medicine community. If that were true, doctors wouldn’t prescribe antibiotics for pneumonia, they’d just give you a cough suppressant. If you have pain because of appendicitis, do they treat the pain? No, they remove the appendix – that’s treating the cause, not the symptom. I recently heard Dr. Steven Novella (a neurologist and prof at the Yale School of Medicine) talking about this, and he said that other than managing the pain of terminal patients to make them comfortable, so-called “Western” medicine is entirely about treating the cause of health problems and not just the symptoms. So is alternative medicine, but the two just disagree on how to determine the causes. Western medicine uses science, alternative medicine uses magic.

I had severe acute pancreatitis a few years ago and spent two months in the hospital. One of my biggest symptoms was intense pain, caused by my pancreas effectively choking on a gallstone. Did the doctors treat my pain? Of course they did. They also performed major abdominal surgery, an MRI, several X-rays and ultrasounds, countless CT scans and a number of other procedures to deal with the cause of this condition, not just the pain. Three years later, except for being a type 2 diabetic I am fully back to normal, and I owe my life to those doctors and nurses. How would an acupuncturist deal with pancreatitis? They wouldn’t – they’d either (a) send you to a hospital because they know they can do nothing, or (b) ironically attempt to treat the pain and not the cause, thereby killing you.

The author says that fever is our body’s natural reaction to an infection (true) and that we shouldn’t attempt to reduce the fever because of that. But then a couple of paragraphs later, she says we should use “good old fashioned ‘grandmas recipes’… like placing the soles of the feet in water for a fever”. Didn’t she just say we should not try to reduce fever?

Look to Homeopathy. … Or find a local homeopath to work with, Queen Elizabeth does!

Not only has homeopathy never been proven effective, it’s actually harmful to those who would use it instead of seeing a real doctor and getting real medication (7). In fact, there is no known mechanism by which it could be effective.  It’s nothing but water or a sugar pill – the very definition of placebo. The fact that Queen Elizabeth has been duped into using homeopathy means nothing.

And finally EMF. Electromagnetic Fields. We live in a world of wireless. There are frequencies from our cell phones, internet connections, microwaves, smart TVs, etc, all around us and our cells are not accustomed to that. The damage is not yet fully known.

Electromagnetic sensitivity has repeatedly been shown to be nonexistent. People who claim that they are negatively affected by electromagnetic fields consistently show symptoms until proper blinding is added. When they don’t already know whether they are being exposed or not, they can’t tell. (8, 9)

The article then links to a couple of web sites that sell products that are supposed to help people with EMF sensitivity. Since EMF sensitivity doesn’t exist, these products can’t work, and some of the claims they make are ridiculous. But that doesn’t stop these people from charging $89 for something that “protects you from cell phone radiation”,  between $310 and $380 for a plate that “clears EMF pollution and geopathic stress”, and even $160 for the ultimate in irony: a USB thingy that uses your wifi router to somehow broadcast EMF protection.

These kind of articles frustrate me to no end, because the more articles like this there are, the more likely people are to read them and believe them. Science and modern “Western” medicine has given us the world we live in today – people are healthier now than ever before, life spans are longer, fewer people are dying of hunger, and so on. We haven’t solved all the problems – people do still die of hunger and there are still many diseases that science has not yet found answers for – but the human average lifespan has more than doubled since 1900 and that’s due to science, not to people harmonizing their life energy field with that of the earth.

The entire goal of science is and has always been to advance human knowledge. So why is it that so many people are now rejecting science and getting their health information from whoever on the internet? They ignore just about every doctor in the world and listen to Jenny McCarthy when it comes to vaccines. They believe that anything “all-natural” must be healthier than anything that’s not (as I’ve said before, e. coli and salmonella are all-natural, while Tylenol is not). They read Natural News and believe the guy who tries to convince the world (without evidence) that the entire healthcare and pharmaceutical industries worldwide are global conspiracies and that millions of people wouldn’t die of cancer every year if they just listened to him.

The worst part is that it’s not just the cranks and tinfoil-hat people who believe this stuff – the general public seems to think that GMO food will kill us all and that obviously organic food is healthier than non-organic. What happens if some company uses genetic modification to create a type of wheat or rice or corn or whatever that is resistant to diseases and has extra nutrients and can be stored for longer without going bad and allows farms to increase their yield tenfold? Note that this is not outside the realm of possibility – these kinds of things are why we do genetic manipulation in the first place. Crops like this could solve much of the world’s hunger problems (and yes I know that’s a little simplistic) but if enough people are scared of GMO food, it may not matter because the research will get shut down before we get there. That’s really sad.

I can only hope that sometime in the not-too-distant future, people start embracing science once again and abandoning things like medicine based on magic or remedies that are popular only because they were used in China a few thousand years ago or fear of things just because they are not well understood. Let’s start moving human knowledge forwards again, not pushing it backwards.

References

Unlike the original article, I am including references for all the claims I’ve made here.

1. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
2. The Annals of Internal Medicine, produced by the American College of Physicians
3. An FDA quote from CBS Chicago
4. The World Health Organization. You may disagree with the business practices and policies of GMO companies like Monsanto, but that’s a problem with the companies, not the GMO food itself.
5. The Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
6. No references here, because I couldn’t find any from reliable science-based medicine sites talking about corn or soy problems or dairy problems that weren’t related to lactose-intolerance. But bullshit sites like Natural News were filled with articles saying dairy is universally harmful, which implies to me that it’s not.
7. The Journal of Medical Ethics
8. Psychosomatic Medicine, from the Journal of Biobehavioral Medicine
9. The World Health Organization

Yet another “Facebook is making all your data public!” hoax is making the rounds. This one has to do with the new Facebook Graph thing that was just rolled out over the last couple of weeks. And once again, as we see so often, people are posting it without thinking. Here’s the text:

Hello to all of you who are on my list of contacts of Facebook. I would like to ask a favor of you…. You may not know that Facebook has changed its privacy configuration once again. Thanks to the new “Graphic app”, any person in Facebook anywhere in the world can see our photos, our “likes” and our “comments”. During the next two weeks, I am going to keep this message posted and I ask you to do the following and comment “DONE”. Those of my friends who do not maintain my information in private will be eliminated from my list of friends, because I want the information I share with you, my friends, to remain among my friends and not be available to the whole world. I want to be able to publish photos of my friends and family without strangers being able to see them which is what happens now when you choose “like” or “comment”.

Unfortunately we cannot change this configuration because Facebook has made it like this. So, please, place your cursor over my photo that appears in this box (without clicking) and a window will open. Now move the cursor to the word “Friends”, again without clicking and then on “Settings”. Uncheck “Life Events” and “Comments and Like”. This way my activity with my family and friends will no longer be made public. Now, copy and paste this text on your own wall (do not “share” it!). Once I see it published on your page, I will un-check the same for you. Thanks so much!!

Let’s do some critical thinking and examine this, shall we?

1. Facebook has over a billion users. Granted, the company has never been known for its tight security and in the past they have changed default settings (i.e. those for new users or those who were using the defaults anyway) so that they were less secure than before. But changing existing security settings would likely piss a lot of people off. Are they likely to do this?
2. Facebook security settings are kind of silly anyway. You should always assume that anything you post on Facebook or anywhere else on the internet will be available to everyone in the world forever. Regardless of what you post and how you attempt to protect it, there’s nothing stopping someone from cutting and pasting it or taking a screen shot and posting that or even printing it on a piece of paper. Internet privacy is, for the most part, an oxymoron.
3. The average number of friends that any one person has is 130 (reference). Some have many more than this – I know people with 500+ friends. If you post this request and 75% of your friends respond, you’re going to have almost 100 comments on that posting (or hundreds if you’re really popular). Did you really plan to go through your entire friends list in a couple of weeks one by one and “unfriend” those who didn’t respond? Admit it, this was an empty threat.
4. If you really pay attention to the security settings, you should realize that what you’re telling people to do is actually change their own settings so that they will not see your “life events” or “comments and likes”. It has nothing to do with what other people will see.
5. With very rare exceptions, any time you see a posting asking you to repost it or send it to all your friends, it’s almost certainly a hoax. This has been true for many Facebook hoaxes as well as email chain letters and such that I’ve been seeing for over twenty years.

I don’t expect everyone to immediately realize that these things are fake; they are getting more and more “realistic” and I’ve seen people who really should know better get caught by them. But surely anyone who’s been on Facebook for more than a year has seen a few of these, and know better, right? ‘fraid not.

I saw one the other day and left a comment (the very first comment on the posting) saying that it was a hoax. By the next morning, there were three “Done” comments – obviously these people had taken the time to read the entire posting and believe it, but not to read my one-line comment and believe it. I guess this makes sense, since these people are friends of the original poster but none of them knew me. Why should they believe me? So I left another comment with a link to the snopes.com article about it. Surely that will convince people, won’t it? By the end of the day, here’s what I saw:

<bangs head on desk repeatedly>