At a meeting in March, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein told the assembled crowd that wireless Internet technology is dangerous for developing children.
In the video, posted Monday by Patheos blogger Michael Stone, a woman in the audience said that she is a kindergarten teacher who is concerned about children being given devices with screens to learn from at a young age.
Stein said that, yes, it's bad for growing kids to spend too much time glued to screens on TVs or computers. Too much non-human interaction has been shown to negatively affect children's cognition and their ability to socialize and communicate with others.
"And what about the wireless?" the teacher asked.
"We should not be exposing, especially, kids' brains to that," Stein said. "You know, we don't follow that issue in this country, but in Europe where they do, they have good precautions around wireless. Maybe not good enough, because it's very hard to study this stuff. We make guinea pigs out of whole populations and then we discover how many die."
"And this is, like, the paradigm for how healthcare works in this country," she said, "and it's outrageous."
There is no evidence that wireless signals are harmful to adults or children. The World Health Organization (WHO) said in May of 2006 that electromagnetic fields like wireless signals pose no risk to human health.
"(T)he body absorbs up to five times more of the signal from FM radio and television than from base stations," said WHO. "From all evidence accumulated so far, no adverse short- or long-term health effects have been shown to occur from the RF (radiofrequency) signals produced by base stations. Since wireless networks produce generally lower RF signals than base stations, no adverse health effects are expected from exposure to them."
Pollsters say there has been a mild uptick in interest in third party candidates since the political conventions. Disaffected Republicans are planning to cast votes for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, while Stein's Green party is hoping to scoop up supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Stein caught flack over the weekend for tweeting and then deleting a tweet saying that autism is in no way connected to vaccinations. The deletion of the message is being seen by many as a capitulation aimed at roping in supporters of the anti-vaccination or "Anti-vaxx" movement.
Watch the video, embedded below:
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