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Feb 2, 2018: Male rats showed a small increase in a kind of heart tumor after exposure to massive amounts of cellphone radiation, a new government study reports. But don\u2019t read too much into that, experts say \u2014 because those rats bathed in more radiation than even the heaviest cellphone users would experience.<\/p>\n
There are ongoing worries about whether cellphones can give you cancer \u2014 especially brain cancer, since our phones spend so much time near our faces. It\u2019s true that cell phones do emit radiation. But it\u2019s radiofrequency radiation, which is much lower energy than the ionizing radiation you\u2019d get from an X-ray, or, say, nuclear fallout. Ionizing radiation can cause DNA damage that can eventually lead to cancer. But the radiofrequency radiation from a cellphone doesn\u2019t work that way \u2014 and today\u2019s results support that.<\/p>\n
One of the studies reports that male rats exposed to very high levels of radiofrequency radiation grew tumors around their hearts. Female rats exposed to the radiation didn\u2019t, and neither male nor female mice showed obvious health problems in a second study. Neither study turned up clear evidence that radiofrequency radiation causes brain tumors, although the researchers are continuing to investigate. The studies are drafts that haven\u2019t yet been reviewed by outside scientists.<\/p>\n
While the Federal Communication Commission limits how much radiofrequency radiation can come out of your cellphone, the Food and Drug Administration can have a say about whether those limits are safe. So the FDA asked the National Toxicology Program (NTP), a division within the National Institutes of Health, to investigate. Based on the NTP\u2019s results, as well as hundreds of other studies, the FDA is still confident that the current limits on cellphone radiation are safe, according to a statement from Jeffrey Shuren, the director of the FDA\u2019s Center for Devices and Radiological Health.<\/p>\n
The study specifically used 2G and 3G frequencies \u2014 not the frequencies used on more advanced 4G or 5G networks. Researchers exposed the rodents\u2019 entire bodies to the radiowaves for more than nine hours per day, for up to two years. (\u201cA rat that is 2 years old is roughly equivalent to a 70-year-old person,\u201d STAT News reports.) These exposure levels were much higher than what people would experience, John Bucher, senior scientist with the NTP, says in a statement. \u201cSo, these findings should not be directly extrapolated to human cell phone usage,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
And even with these unusually high levels of exposure, the links to cancer were still \u201cmostly equivocal, or ambiguous,\u201d according to the FDA\u2019s statement. In fact, the rats exposed to cell phone radiation actually appeared to live longer than the ones that weren\u2019t, a finding that the FDA\u2019s Shuren says the agency is assessing. The difference could simply be the result of chance, STAT News reports.<\/p>\n
So, what do these results in rodents mean for people? Not a whole lot, experts say. \u201cEven with frequent daily use by the vast majority of adults, we have not seen an increase in events like brain tumors,\u201d the FDA\u2019s statement says. Otis Brawley, the American Cancer Society\u2019s chief medical officer, agreed in an interview with The Associated Press. \u201cThe evidence for an association between cellphones and cancer is weak, and so far, we have not seen a higher cancer risk in people,\u201d Brawley told the AP in a phone interview. \u201cI am actually holding my cellphone up to my ear.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Verge<\/cite><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Feb 2, 2018: Male rats showed a small increase in a kind of heart tumor after exposure to massive amounts of cellphone radiation, a new government study reports. But don\u2019t read too much into that, experts say \u2014 because those rats bathed in more radiation than even the heaviest cellphone users would experience. There are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[89,66],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n