Comments on "Wi-Fi technology and human health impact: a brief review of current knowledge" published in the June 2022 issue of Archives.

Abstract

The article by Prlić et al. (1) is very interesting, and we believe that it is an important and necessary publication to keep both the scientific community and the general public informed of the rapid growth of wireless technology. Here we would like to expand on the information presented in that article and comment on some new measurements of electromagnetic wave intensity [other authors prefer to call this magnitude power density (2)] from the Wi-Fi band in schools or universities (indoor/classroom or outside environment) in different countries. In particular, we would like to complete Table 3 in Prlić’s article (1) with measurements carried out in Spain, Jordan, and other countries presented here in Table 1. The last two columns of Table 1 show three significant figures (2), and the last column shows power density values in μW/m2. The highest measured value is 86200 μW/m2 or 0.0862 W/m2 in three primary and three secondary schools in the United Kingdom (Table 1). This is 20.6 dB below the maximum allowed reference level of 10 W/m2 (24). A recently published review article (25) collected and analysed all types of studies that investigated health and biological effects of Wi-Fi exposure. The authors concluded that the measured exposure levels were several orders of magnitude below the maximum established by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) of 10 W/m2 for whole-body exposure (24). The second important aspect that we want to comment on are non-thermal effects of radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RFEMF). There is a paper by Pall (26), in which he comments in a well-documented manner on seven possible EMF effects in animals and humans, with special emphasis on wireless technologies. Pall claims that repeated Wi-Fi studies (26–28) show that Wi-Fi causes oxidative stress, sperm/testicular damage, neuropsychiatric effects including EEG changes, apoptosis, cellular DNA damage, endocrine changes, and calcium overload in the organism, blocking its ionic channels. However, we believe that it is necessary to continue