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Safety
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 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 2000. Between them, the studies investigated any
possible association between the use of wireless phones and primary
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