Mobile phone radiation limits are safe, FDA concludes following ten year study

25 February 2018 by Steve Blum
, ,

Mobile phones don’t significantly increase the risk of cancer, given current safety limits. That’s the federal Food and Drug Administration’s assessment of two long term studies recently completed by the National Institutes of Health.

Rats and mice were exposed to higher-than-allowed levels – up to six-times as much – of radio frequency radiation for nine hours a day for two years. According to the NIH, only one significant negative effect was observed, and only in male rats…

High exposure to radio frequency radiation (RFR) in rodents resulted in tumors in tissues surrounding nerves in the hearts of male rats, but not female rats or any mice, according to draft studies from the National Toxicology Program (NTP)…

“The levels and duration of exposure to RFR were much greater than what people experience with even the highest level of cell phone use, and exposed the rodents’ whole bodies. So, these findings should not be directly extrapolated to human cell phone usage,” said John Bucher, Ph.D., NTP senior scientist. “We note, however, that the tumors we saw in these studies are similar to tumors previously reported in some studies of frequent cell phone users.”

Based on those findings, the FDA concluded that “we have not found sufficient evidence that there are adverse health effects in humans caused by exposures at or under the current radio frequency energy exposure limits”.

Research will continue into the possible effects of holding a mobile phone up against a human head for extended periods of time, as it should. But there’s an important distinction to be made: the level of radiation from a mobile phone in direct contact with skin is thousands (millions?) of times greater than the RF energy that same skin would absorb from a big cell tower or a small cell facility mounted closer to the ground.

By all the evidence, that risk is zero.

NTP technical report on the toxicology and carcinogenesis studies in B6C3F1/N mice exposed to whole-body radio frequency radiation at a frequency (1,900 MHz) and modulations (GSM and CDMA) used by cell phones.

NTP technical report on the toxicology and carcinogenesis studies in Hsd:Sprague Dawley SD rats exposed to whole-body radio frequency radiation at a frequency (900 MHz) and modulations (GSM and CDMA) used by cell phones.