Table of Contents
Advertisement
Health and safety information
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
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
conditions under which people use wireless phones, so we don't know
with certainty what the results of such studies mean for human health.
Three large epidemiology studies have been published since December
2000. Between them, the studies investigated any possible association
between the use of wireless phones and primary brain cancer, glioma,
meningioma, or acoustic neuroma, tumors of the brain or salivary
gland, leukemia, or other cancers. None of the studies demonstrated
the existence of any harmful health effects from wireless phones RF
exposures. However, none of the studies can answer questions about
long-term exposures, since the average period of phone use in these
studies was around three years.
What research is needed to decide whether RF exposure from
wireless phones poses a health risk?
A combination of laboratory studies and epidemiological studies of
people actually using wireless phones would provide some of the data
151
Advertisement
Table of Contents
