Most authorities are OK with wifi, but there’s a growing rebellion

Published On Sun Oct 23 2011

For the past half decade, Ontario school board officials have maintained wifi is safe in schools. Still, the public remains skeptical, indeed increasingly so.

Recently, parents in the York region have been lobbying to remove wifi — the low-level radiofrequency energy that allows computers and smart phones to communicate wirelessly — from elementary schools, threatening to pull their children out of class and protest at Queen’s Park if they don’t see action.

“The concern is cancer, of course,” says Lynnette Haralampopoulos, a 40-year-old MRI technologist, who has son and daughter in elementary school.

“My child is in there for 5 days a week, 6 hours a day being pulsed with microwaves,” she says, “it doesn’t matter whether it’s in the bathroom or in the classroom, they’re getting radiation.”

The York parents are only the latest in a wave of opponents. Over the summer, the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario set up a committee to study the technology. Earlier this fall, two private schools in Ontario, Wayside Academy in Peterborough and Pretty River Academy in Collingwood, quietly dismantled their school’s wifi and last week the issue came up spontaneously during a Toronto Public Library Board Meeting.

The movement has inspired a small industry of wifi gurus, like Magda Havas, an associate professor of environment at Trent University, who lectures at events hosted by wifi activists and politicians, including green party leader Elizabeth May. Havas’ online videos on the perils of what she calls electrosmog and electrosensitivity — headaches, dizziness and nausea said to be caused by wifi — are watched by hundreds.

According to the City of Toronto, “There is no health reason to avoid the use of wifi.” Generally, Canadian school boards and government agencies of all jurisdictional levels agree.

However, the spectre of invisible harmful waves is hard to dismiss in the age of man-made radioactive disaster — Fukushima, for example — and earlier this month, when Health Canada issued a warning that children under 18 should limit their cell phone use, concern grew.

There are signs the complaints are being taken seriously. Christel Martin, a retired 60-year-old in Nanaimo, B.C., says since the summer she’s been receiving several hundred dollars in CPP disability benefits for her wifi-related maladies.

Back in Ontario, Haralampopoulos is co-hosting an event Tuesday on the second floor of a Loblaws Real Canadian Superstore in Newmarket. She hopes to add urgency to her cause. “Pretty much these kids are guinea pigs,” she says, “we didn’t consent for our child to be in that environment.”

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1074669