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Safety
• Occupational Safety and H ealth Administration
• National Telecommunication s and Information Adminis tration
The National Institutes of H ealth participates in so me interagency
working group activities, as wel l.
FDA shares regulatory res ponsibilities for wire less phones with the
Federal Communicati ons Commission (FCC ). All phones that are so ld
in the United States must comp ly with FCC safety guidel ines that limit
RF exposure. FCC relies on FDA and oth er health agencies for safe ty
questions about wireless phones.
FCC also regulates the base st ations that the wireless ph one networks
rely upon. While these bas e stations operate at higher p ower than do
the wireless phones the mselves, the RF exposures t hat people get
from these base stations are t ypically thousand s of times lower than
those they can get from wirel ess phones. Base station s are thus not the
primary subject of the s afety questions discu ssed in this document.
kWhat are the resu lts of the research don e already?
The research done thus fa r has produced conflict ing results, and many
studies have suffered fr om flaws in their research met hods. Animal
experiments investigatin g the effects of radiofreque ncy energy (RF)
exposures characteris tic of wireless phones have yi elded conflicting
results that often cannot be r epeated in other laboratorie s. A few animal
studies, however, have suggested that low leve ls of RF could accelerate
the development of cancer in l aboratory animals. However, many of
the studies that showed incre ased tumor development us ed animals
that had been genetical ly engineered or treated w ith cancer-causing
chemicals so as to be pre-di sposed to develop cancer i n the absence
of RF exposure. Other studies ex posed the animals to RF for up to 22
hours per day. These conditi ons are not similar to the condi tions under
which people use wirel ess phones, so we don’t know with ce rtainty
what the results of such studi es mean for human health.
Three large epidemio logy studies have been pub lished since Decemb er