User's Manual

Health and Safety Information 91
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 to 22 hours per day. These conditions are not