In the 1950s, anything that went wrong — the weather, a bout of flu, England losing at cricket — tended to be blamed on the effects of nuclear tests. There was, of course, no connection.

Today radio signals from mobile phones, mobile phone masts and now wi-fi installations have taken over where nuclear tests left off. Feeling a bit peaky? It’s probably that mobile mast round the corner.

It can’t be said often enough that there is hardly a shred of worthwhile evidence to support the worries.

In some US schools, and even in a university in Canada, wi-fi has been banned until it can be “proved safe”. Can Canadian academic standards be so low that they do not know it is impossible to prove anything safe? The best that can be hoped for is no evidence of risk: evidence of no risk is asking the impossible.

People who worry about mobile phones and wi-fi should be asked why they don’t worry about TV transmitters, radar installations, or telephones you can carry about the house, which communicate with their base stations using radio signals.

Ever since Marconi, we have been enveloped in a fog of radio-frequency transmissions of various powers and wavelengths. They activate our TV sets, and play a pretty tune on the tranny. Until somebody started the alarm over mobile phones, nobody except the mentally disturbed gave radio waves a second thought.

Wi-fi works at much lower power levels and over shorter ranges than mobile phone networks, so is even less likely to cause a problem. But even writing this implies that mobile phones themselves may be a problem when there is no persuasive evidence that they are.

It would be much better if these scares could be strangled at birth, before they have a chance to become embedded in the psyche of the anxious. But they never are.

Stand by for a Government inquiry, a programme of research (paid for by the industry, naturally, not the protesters) and the invocation of the Precautionary Principle. Wake me when it’s all over.

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