Well, when working with voltages at <100 it isn't really an issue. However, as the voltage potential increases as does the ionizing power of the subsequent rf produced in the discharge.
There was another man besides Meyer who developed a water plug for use in ICEs, his name escapes me at the moment...however, he was a lead engineer of skunkworks, and so the government said "Due to the "soft x-ray" radiation released during (what he labeled) "radiolysis", they would not allow production for civilians, but, due to "his" extensive background, they would allow him to continue to drive his car". The whole time knowing that, the electro-negative engine block would ground out all radiation.
We all want to directly observe our experiments, however, a lot, if not all discharges should be shielded...do an experiment, run a simple discharge through air next to a speaker with a bias power of a couple volts (just enough to make the electromagnet energize and float the cone)...it will pick up that spark gap as noise (it's all radiation). Physically we are essentially micro and macrocosms of RLC circuits, we pick up all that radiation just like the coil...the problem arises when you start subjecting yourself to discharges of higher than 100volts, around 5kv and there is serious risk of cellular degradation. The danger is inversely related to distance and directly related eV...the problem isn't that we take on too much charge or anything...it's due to the fact that light is a particle-wave, and its particle characteristic is like a cannonball to our DNA.
