FDA Consumer Update

atmosphere and obey all signs and instructions. Sparks in such areas could cause an explosion or fire resulting in bodily injury or even death.

Areas with a potentially explosive atmosphere are not always clearly marked. They include fueling areas such as gasoline stations; below deck on boats; fuel or chemical transfer or storage facilities; vehicles using liquefied petroleum gas(such as propane or butane); areas where the air contains chemicals or particles, such as grain, dust, or metal powders; and any other area where you would normally be advised to turn off you your vehicle engine.

FDA has been receiving inquiries about the safety of mobile phones, including cellular phones and PCS phones. The following summarizes what is known—and what remains unknown—about whether these products can pose a hazard to health, and what can be done to minimize any potential risk. This information may be used to respond to questions.

Why the concern?

Mobile phones emit low levels of radiofrequency energy (i.e., radiofrequency radiation) in the microwave range while being used. They also emit very low levels of radiofrequency energy (RF), considered non-significant, when in the stand-by mode. It is well known that high levels of RF can produce biological damage through heating effects (this is how your microwave oven is able to cook food). However, it is not known whether, to what extent, or through what mechanism, lower levels of RF might cause adverse health effects as well. Although some research has been done to address these questions, no clear picture of the biological effects of this type of radiation has emerged to date. Thus, the available science does not allow us to conclude that mobile phones are absolutely safe, or that they are unsafe. However, the available scientific evidence does not demonstrate any adverse health effects associated with the use of mobile phones.

What kinds of phones are in question?

Questions have been raised about hand-held mobile phones, the kind that have a built-in antenna that is positioned close to the user’s head during normal telephone conversation. These types of mobile phones are of concern because of the short distance

between the phone’s antenna—the primary source of the RF—and the person’s head. The exposure to RF from mobile phones in which the antenna is located at greater distances from the user (on the outside of a car, for example) is drastically lower than that from hand-held phones, because a person’s RF exposure decreases rapidly with distance from the source. The safety of so-called “cordless phones,” which have a base unit connected to the telephone wiring in a house and which operate at far lower power levels and frequencies, has not been questioned.

How much evidence is there that hand-held mobile phones might be harmful?

Briefly, there is not enough evidence to know for sure, either way; however, research efforts are on-going.

The existing scientific evidence is conflicting and many of the studies that have been done to date have suffered from flaws in their research methods. Animal experiments investigating the effects of RF exposures characteristic of mobile phones have yielded conflicting results. A few animal studies, however, have suggested that low levels of RF could accelerate the development of cancer in laboratory animals. In one study, mice genetically altered to be predisposed to developing one type of cancer developed more than twice as many such cancers when they were exposed to RF energy compared to controls. There is much uncertainty among scientists about whether results obtained from animal studies apply to the use of mobile phones. First, it is uncertain how to apply the results obtained in rats and mice to humans. Second, many of the studies that showed increased tumor development used animals that had already been treated with cancer-causing chemicals, and other studies exposed the animals to the RF virtually continuously—up to 22 hours per day.

For the past five years in the United States, the mobile phone industry has supported research into the safety of mobile phones. This research has resulted in two findings in particular that merit additional study:

In a hospital-based, case-control study, researchers looked for an association between mobile phone use and either glioma (a type of brain cancer) or acoustic neuroma (a benign tumor of the nerve sheath). No statistically significant association was found between mobile phone use and acoustic neuroma. There was also no association between mobile phone use and gliomas when all types of types of gliomas were considered together. It should be noted

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