Is Everyday Technology Killing Us?

stpmic

Mod note: link removed

I work in a school district as the Director of Instruction. A parent came to me with a concern based on the video link above. The main point David Wolfe is trying to make is that the technolgoy we are using is harmful to our bodies becasue it is emiting 20-1000 mhz of electricty that has been known to casue seaizures and other negative side effects to humans.

What is the truth?

DragonPetter

The energy in this frequency band is low and the wavelengths associated are so large that they do not interact with us much on an atomic level. At 1000 MHz, the wavelength is about 1/3 of a meter or about 1 foot. Not much energy will be transferred to our cells to cause damage to them since they're physically so much smaller than that wavelength. The most likely kind of energy transferred to them would be heat energy, but your cells receive heat energy all the time even in the absense of electromagnetic radiation. The wavelengths are too large and so low energy that they cannot ionize the atoms in our cells, which is usually the type or radiation we link to cancer and other harmful effects.

There are cases that electromagnetic radiation can cause harm, but this is at very high intensity and we don't even come close to this with cell phones and electronics devices.

As to that video, the guy is a crackpot and I don't even want to start going on how wrong he is and the assumptions he is making. Also notice all the "health" products he's trying to sell in his living room.

DaveC426913

How does he figure that grounding himself means he's no longer being bombarded by the radiation?

stpmic

Are their studies or the effects pertaining to certainin populations (reference groups) of people... for example would the effect be different for someone with a pacemaker, or epilepsy, small children vs adults?

Side Note: The sales pitch was a dead give away for me, however I needed to ask the question. I often think about the harmful effects of our daily intentional actions like loud music, inattentive driving, dkrinking, smoking, etc....this seemed way low on my radar as a harmful effect. Thanks for the fast reply!

Moonbear

Given the general agreement that the site in question is just a scammy sales pitch, I'll avoid discussing it directly.

I'll just address the one most common misconception...that microwaves interfere with pacemakers. Back in the early days of pacemakers and the early days of microwave ovens with poor shielding or inadequate safety mechanisms, it was possible to have interference (albeit much lower risk than warning signs might have suggested). Today, however, pacemakers are designed not to have problems with interference from these common household appliances, and microwave ovens are well-shielded too.

Some frequencies of light patterns can induce a seizure in those prone to seizures, but I don't know anything about other forms of energy waves being an issue.

Pythagorean

Err... Some kind of Faraday cage bs argument?