8
Heal
th an
d saf
ety
infor
mati
on
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,
