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180 Appendix
These RF exposures are limited by Federal Communications Commission
safety guidelines that were developed with the advice of 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 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
predisposed 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 brain cancer,
glioma, meningioma, or acoustic neu-roma, 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.