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Section 12: Health and Safety Information 133
Consumer Information on Wireless Phones
Section 12
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.
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 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 absence of RF
exposure. Other studies exposed the animals to RF for up