The 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. The FCC relies on the FDA and other health agencies for safety questions about wireless phones.
The 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 subject
of the safety questions discussed in this document.
3.What kinds of phones are the subject of this update?
The term ‘wireless phone’ refers here to handheld wireless phones with
Safety Guidelines
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
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
