Health and Safety Information
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Health and Safety Information
H
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are thus not the primary subject of the safety questions
discussed in this document.
What are the results of the research done
already?
e 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 day. ese 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.
ree 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
e FDA belongs to an interagency working group of
the federal agencies that have responsibility for different
aspects of RF safety to ensure coordinated efforts at the
federal level. e following agencies belong to this
working group:
• National Institute for Occupational Safety and
Health
• Environmental Protection Agency
• Federal Communications Commission
• Occupational Safety and Health Administration
• National Telecommunications and Information
Administration
e National Institutes of Health participates in some
interagency working group activities, as well.
e 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.
e 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
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