Section 12: Health and Safety Information 175Consumer Information on Wireless PhonesSection 12comply with FCC safety guidelines that limit RFexposure. FCC relies on FDA and other health agenciesfor safety questions about wireless phones.FCC also regulates the base stations that the wirelessphone networks rely upon. While these base stationsoperate at higher power than do the wireless phonesthemselves, the RF exposures that people get from thesebase stations are typically thousands of times lower thanthose they can get from wireless phones. Base stations arethus not the primary subject of the safety questionsdiscussed in this document.What are the results of the research done already?The research done thus far has produced conflictingresults, and many studies have suffered from flaws intheir research methods. Animal experimentsinvestigating the effects of radio frequency energy (RF)exposures characteristic of wireless phones have yieldedconflicting results that often cannot be repeated in otherlaboratories. A few animal studies, however, havesuggested that low levels of RF could accelerate thedevelopment of cancer in laboratory animals. However,many of the studies that showed increased tumordevelopment used animals that had been geneticallyengineered or treated with cancer-causing chemicals so asto be pre-disposed to develop cancer in absence of RFexposure. Other studies exposed the animals to RF for upto 22 hours per day. These conditions are not similar to theconditions under which people use wireless phones, sowe don't know with certainty what the results of suchstudies mean for human health.a990.book Page 175 Wednesday, February 22, 2006 4:37 PM
