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Safety
• Occupational Safety and Health Administration
• National Telecommunications and Information Administration
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.
k 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 radiofrequency 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. 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