Next week may be challenging for British GPs.

We are going to be asked if it is "safe" to have Wi-Fi installations in schools and at home. And, for good measure, there may be some questions about mobile phones and bees.

The silly season is still not upon us but Sunday is a difficult day for newspaper scoops, and so there is always a slight air of "silliness". Headline stories are run for one day, but then disappear without trace.

Today, the Independent is running a "Wi-fi" warning. It tells us that:

• Several European provincial governments have already taken action to ban or limit Wi-fi in the classroom. (But no details are given of where this action has been taken.)
• Stowe School has "partially" removed Wi-fi because a teacher was ill. (How do you partially remove it?)

And then it goes on to tell us that: "virtually no studies have been carried out into Wi-fi's effects on pupils, but it gives off radiation similar to emissions from mobile phones and phone masts." A tendentious and provocative bit of juxtaposition if ever there were, from the school of gutter journalism that produces headlines like "No truth in the rumour that Princess Margaret had an affair with Mick Jagger."

This is a scare story, with no facts to back it up. Far more interesting are reports further on in the paper, quoting some journalists of real repute: the bloggers.

The excellent Grrrlscientist, who is a molecular evolutionary biologist, asks "Are cell phones killing bees?"

• I've heard a lot of strange hypotheses in my life, but this one is one of the strangest: mobile phones may be wiping out bees.
• A Swedish research team observed that radiation from mobile phones kills brain cells, raising the possibility that teenagers could become senile in the prime of their lives.
• All in all, the potential health damage due to radiation from hi-tech gadgets combined with the loss of the world's bees is a very scary prospect.

My gut reaction is that this is nonesense; pseudo-scientific quackery. I have never believed that proximity to radio waves and electricity pylons has any affect on health. I doubt that Wi-fi and mobiles are a threat either.

And yet, and yet.life is full of uncertainties. I am not aware of any definitive research that demolishes theses theories and, anyway, it is impossible to prove a negative. It is this impossibility that becomes the Quack's charter.

I have three problems:

Our house is full of teenagers, computers, Wi-fi and mobile phones.

Over a number of years of exposure to radium, Marie Curie suffered radiation burns and finally died of leukaemia.

I love honey.

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It gets worse. It is not just the Independent.

Tim Worstall points out to me that the Sunday Times is at it as well. See Tim on "Cancer Clusters and Mobile phone masts"Labels: honey, mobile phones, wi-fi. Posted by: Dr John Crippen    Source