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136 Health and Safety Information
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Health and Safety Information 137
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.
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