LONDON — Senior health experts and politicians in the U.K. have called for more experiments into the impact of potential health risks to children in schools from Wi-Fi. The moves come ahead of a documentary being screened Monday (May 21) evening by the BBC, some of whose conclusions other scientists have called "grossly unscientific" and "nothing but a scare story."

The program will claim that the radiation given off by a Wi-Fi laptop is "three times higher than the ... signal strength of a typical phone mast". But the experiment carried out by the program did not take into account a "basic" scientific concept and presented a bogus comparison, critics say.

They also note that the readings were well beneath the U.K. government's safety limits - as much as 600 times below.

Dr Ian Gibson, the Member of Parliament for Norwich North and a former chairman of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, who last year called for an investigation into the apparent dangers from the radiation emitted by Wi-Fi enabled computers and wireless routers, repeated his concerns. "There needs to be an inquiry into whether there are dangers from Wi-Fi in schools. It has been introduced without any investigation into its effects on people's health. If it is safe, people ought to provide the data to prove it," said Gibson.

One of the schools being used to highlight potential concerns is in Gibson's constituency in Norwich.

About half of the U.K. primary schools and the majority of secondary schools already have a wireless network installed. However, campaign groups and some scientists are concerned that the expansion of the technology has happened without adequate research into the effects of Wi-Fi radiation.

Paddy Regan, a physicist at the University of Surrey, criticized the experiment at the heart of Panorama's claims because the measurements of signal power had not been made at equal distances from the mobile phone mast and the Wi-Fi laptop.

A spokesman for the program told the Guardian newspaper that the "three times higher" comparison was based on measurements taken one meter away from the laptop and 100 meters away from the phone mast, although material sent to journalists promoting the programme did not make this clear.

Dr Regan said: "It is a basic fundamental of science measurement, that if you are trying to compare things you have to take into account the so-called inverse square law." To make a fair comparison between two radiation sources the measurements should be taken at the same distance away.

The levels measured by the Panorama investigation were 600 times lower than levels considered dangerous by the government. "It does sound like a scare story to me," said Regan.

Panorama's spokesman defended the methodology by saying the phone mast measurement was "at the point at which the beam was at greatest intensity where it hit the ground."

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