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Occupational Safety and Health Administration
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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 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.