To continue yesterday’s discussion of technological luddites, today we will talk about Wifi allergies. People are allergic to WiFi, or so they claim. They say that exposure to electromagnetic fields is making them sick, and many of them literally resort to wearing tin foil hats. There are many cases on the Internet of people who claim to be sensitive to electromagnetic fields.
- There is this guy, who sued his neighbor for not shutting down his WiFi in 2010.
- Or the parents who sued their child’s school for having WiFi that was making him ill in 2017
- The teen who committed suicide because of WiFi sensitivity
- The woman who lives in a home lined with tin foil
- Some say that they are allergic to cell phone towers
They are full of crap. Let me explain why. When I was in the Navy, one of my jobs was to minimize the ship’s magnetic field in order to avoid magnetically triggered mines and torpedoes. We did this with a system of magnetic coils and a computer that analyzed the ship’s location on the planet, and ran electricity through coils that opposed the natural magnetic field of the ship as it passed through the earth’s magnetic field.
Magnetic fields are subject to the inverse square law. The farther away you are from the object generating a magnetic field, the weaker that field. One unit of measure for magnetic fields generated by electrical currents is microwatts per cubic centimeter, and the safe level is determined by the frequency of the field being generated. Safe limits for EMF in the frequency band that WiFi operates in is about 1,000 microwatts per square centimeter. The safe level of EMF at the frequency of household current (60 hz) is 100,000 microwatts per cubic centimeter.
A WiFi router has a field density of about 50.5 uW/cm^2 at the device, but that quickly drops with distance. Six feet away, that field has dropped by 99.6% to only 0.2 uW/cm^2.

Refer back to the woman who claimed that her husband’s smartwatch was making her ill. At three feet, a smartwatch is putting out a field of 0.11 uW/cm^2. Then there are the people who are allergic to cell phone towers. When I am 1,000 feet from my closest tower, I measure that field at 0.001 uW/cm^2. In other words, nearly nothing. But good enough for 5 bars!
Every one of the people who claim to be allergic to EMF are self diagnosed. Multiple studies of this phenomenon have been performed, and in each case they react when told that the WiFi is on, but don’t react when it is turned on without their knowledge. In short, it’s a mental health issue and not a real problem.
Similar to what we are seeing with transgenderism. People are just dealing with mental health issues, and the Internet is giving them a voice.


