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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
