What kinds of phones are in question?

Questions have been raised about hand held mobile phones, the 

kind that have a built in antenna that is positioned close to the 

user s head during normal telephone conversation. These types 

of mobile phones are of concern because of the short distance 

between the phone s antenna the primary source of the RF 

and the person s head. The exposure to RF from mobile phones 

in which the antenna is located at greater distances from the 

user (on the outside of a car, for example) is drastically lower 

than that from hand held phones, because a person s RF 

exposure decreases rapidly with distance from the source. The 

safety of so called  cordless phones,  which have a base unit 

connected to the telephone wiring in a house and which operate 

at far lower power levels and frequencies, has not been 

questioned.

How much evidence is there that hand held mobile 

phones might be harmful?

Briefly, there is not enough evidence to know for sure, either 

way; however, research efforts are on going. The existing 

scientific evidence is conflicting and many of the studies that 

have been done to date have suffered from flaws in their 

research methods. Animal experiments investigating the effects 

of RF exposures characteristic of mobile phones have yielded 

conflicting results. A few animal studies, however, have 

suggested that low levels of RF could accelerate the 

development of cancer in laboratory animals. In one study, mice 

genetically altered to be predisposed to developing one type of 

cancer developed more than twice as many such cancers when 

they were exposed to RF energy compared to controls. There is 

much uncertainty among scientists about whether results 

obtained from animal studies apply to the use of mobile phones. 

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