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SAFETYSAFETY
• National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Environmental Protection Agency
• Federal Communications Commission
• 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.
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 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 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.
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