Safety and usage information
14
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