Nokia 3300 User Manual page 247

• 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 times lower than those they can
get from wireless phones. Base stations are thus not the subject of the safety questions
discussed in this document.
3. What kinds of phones are the subject of this update?
The term wireless phone refers here to hand-held wireless phones with built-in antennas,
often called cell mobile or PCS phones. These types of wireless phones can expose the
user to measurable radio frequency energy (RF) because of the short distance between
the phone and the user's head. These RF exposures are limited by Federal
Communications Commission safety guidelines that were developed with the advice of
FDA and other federal health and safety agencies. When the phone is located at greater
distances from the user, the exposure to RF is drastically lower because a person's RF
exposure decreases rapidly with increasing distance from the source. The so-called
cordless phones; which have a base unit connected to the telephone wiring in a house,
typically operate at far lower power levels, and thus produce RF exposures far below the
FCC safety limits.
4. 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 the
absence of RF exposure. Other studies exposed the animals to RF for up to 22 hours per
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