[K12OSN] Slightly OT - Wireless in your school/building

[Calvin Dodge]

Clifford, there's a real reason to be skeptical of such claims,
especially when someone stands to make serious cash (or get a big
splash of fame) from those claims.

Remember silicone breast implants? Remember how lawyers who claimed
clients had health problems from the same, reaped hundreds of millions
of dollars, and drove a Dow division into bankruptcy?

What's interesting is that subsequent studies showed NO correlation
between those implants and their supposed bad side effects. There is
NO difference in the rate of autoimmune diseases betwen women with the
implants, and women who didn't have them. But the lawyers got to keep
their ill-gotten gains.

Then there was the whole "fetal oxygen deficiency for a few seconds
causes cerebral palsy" bandwagon. Lawyers made lots of money from that
theory, and medical practice changed as a result. Fetal oxygen
monitors are now used everywhere, and the incidence of Ceasarean
births has gone way up.  And what's the result of all this activity to
prevent the supposed cause of cerebral palsy? Nothing - the rate
hasn't changed at all. But the lawyers get to keep their millions of
dollars, while obstetricians become harder to find.

More recently there was the "mercury in vaccines causes autism"
hysteria. There it turns out the fellow who first made this claim
falsified his data. But he gets to keep the money he earned from
lectures and such, and so do all the others who jumped on that
bandwagon.

Plenty of other examples abound, like the nonsense about hexavalent
chromium which garnered a couple of million dollars for that fraud,
Erin Brockovich.

So, no, I'm not going to automatically run in terror because somebody
claims "lots of health-related concerns" from WiFi. I want to see
multiple studies from a variety of sources, to reduce the chance that
confirmation bias (or even outright fraud) is resulting in a false
claim.

Calvin Dodge