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
These types of wireless phones can expose the user to measurable Radio Frequency (RF) energy because of the short distance between the phone and the user’s head.
These RF exposures are limited by FCC safety guidelines that were developed with the advice of the 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 Radio Frequency (RF) energy 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
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