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Health and safety information
•
"National Institute for Occupational
Safety and Health
•
"Environmental Protection Agency
•
"Federal Communications Commission
•
"Occupational Safety and Health
Administration
•
"National Telecommunications and
Information Administration
The National Institutes of Health participates
in some interagency working group
activities, as well.
FDA shares regulatory responsibilities for
wireless phones with the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC). All
phones that are sold in the United States
must comply with FCC safety guidelines that
limit RF exposure. FCC relies on FDA and
other health agencies for safety questions
about wireless phones.
FCC also regulates the base stations that the
wireless phone networks rely upon. While
these base stations operate at higher power
than do the wireless phones themselves, the
RF exposures that people get from these
base stations are typically thousands of
118
times lower than those they can get from
wireless phones. Base stations are thus not
the primary subject of the safety questions
discussed in this document.
What are the results of the research
done already?
The research done thus far has produced
conflicting results, and many studies have
suffered from flaws in their research
methods. Animal experiments investigating
the effects of radio frequency energy (RF)
exposures characteristic of wireless phones
have yielded conflicting results that often
cannot be repeated in other laboratories. A
few animal studies, however, have
suggested that low levels of RF could
accelerate the development of cancer in
laboratory animals. However, many of the
studies that showed increased tumor
development used animals that had been
genetically engineered or treated with
cancer-causing chemicals so as to be pre-
disposed to develop cancer in absence of RF
exposure. Other studies exposed the
animals to RF for up to 22 hours per day.
These conditions are not similar to the
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