Health and Safety Information 90
safety to ensure coordinated efforts at the federal level. The
following agencies belong to this working group:
•
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
•
Environmental Protection Agency
•
Federal Communications Commission
•
Occupational Safety and Health Administration
•
National Telecommunications and Information Administration
The National Institutes of Health participates in some interagency
working group activities, as well.
FDA shares regulatory responsibilities for wireless devices with
the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). All devices 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 devices.
FCC also regulates the base stations that the wireless device
networks rely upon. While these base stations operate at higher
power than do the wireless devices themselves, the RF
exposures that people get from these base stations are typically
thousands of times lower than those they can get from wireless
devices.
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
devices 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 similar to the conditions under which
people use wireless devices, so we don't know with certainty
what the results of such studies mean for human health.
Three large epidemiology studies have been published since
December 2000. Between them, the studies investigated any
possible association between the use of wireless devices and
primary brain cancer, glioma, meningioma, or acoustic neuroma,
tumors of the brain or salivary gland, leukemia, or other cancers.
None of the studies demonstrated the existence of any harmful
health effects from wireless devices RF exposures. However,
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