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For Your Safety
advice of the FDA and other federal health and
safety agencies. When the phone is located at
greater distances from the user, the exposure
to RF is drastically lower because a person's
RF exposure decreases rapidly with increasing
distance from the source. The so-called
“cordless phones,” which have a base unit
connected to the telephone wiring in a house,
typically operate at far lower power levels, and
thus produce RF exposures far below the FCC
safety limits.
4. 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 (RF) energy 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 do not 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 phone 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.
5. What research is needed to decide
whether RF exposure from wireless
phones poses a health risk?
A combination of laboratory studies and
epidemiological studies of people actually
using wireless phones would provide some
of the data that are needed. Lifetime animal