Safety – Kyocera VM1450 User Manual

Page 134

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134

SAFETY

• 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 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.

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 radiofrequency 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 the 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
phones, 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 phones 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 phone RF exposures. However,
none of the studies can answer questions about long-term exposures, since the average period of phone use in
these studies was around three years.

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