A recently published scientific study may have given new life to decades-old concerns about the effects of long-term exposure to radio frequency (RF) radiation generated by certain cell phone technologies.
As recently reported across numerous news platforms, studies recently completed by the National Toxicology Program (NTP) under the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences have concluded that “there is clear evidence that male rats exposed to high levels of radio frequency radiation (RFR) like that used in 2G and 3G cell phones…developed cancerous heart tumors.”
According to an article on the report published on the website of Science Daily, the NTP’s studies into possible links between RF exposure and cancer took more than 10 years to complete and represent the most comprehensive assessment to date on the health effects in animals. At the same time, however, at least one NTP researcher was quick to note that the studies’ findings “cannot be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience when using a cell phone.”
“In our studies, rats and mice received radio frequency radiation across their whole bodies,” said John Bucher, an NTP senior scientist. “By contrast, people are mostly exposed in specific local tissues close to where they hold the phone. In addition, the exposure levels and durations in our studies were greater than what people experience.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was also quick to qualify the application of the studies’ findings to human health considerations. In a statement issued by the FDA within days of the release of the NTP findings, Jeffrey Shuren, Director of the agency’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, noted that “the (NTP) study was not designed to test the safety of cell phone use in humans, so we cannot draw conclusions about the risk of cell phone use from it.”
Read the complete text of the Science Daily posting about the results of the NTP study.
Read the text of the FDA Director Shuren’s comment on the NTP findings.
