Study Says US Undermeasures RF From Cellphones; CTIA Says Consumers Are Safe
IEEE says radiation risk from cellphones may be beyond what industry claims because testing doesn’t involve holding the device next to the body. The paper recommends compliance testing be updated to include body-contact positions and accounting for special vulnerability of…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
children and pregnant women. Industry tests RF absorption at distances of 5 to 25 mm from the body, said Om Gandhi, emeritus professor at the University of Utah, and author of the paper. Gandhi tested what happens when the device is held next to the body. “The U.S. is far behind much of the industrial world in failing to test and monitor phones in the real world. My analysis confirms that currently marketed cellphones could exceed US FCC limits by as high as 11 times the 2-decade old allowable U.S. limits,” Gandhi said. “People use and carry cellphones against their bodies. It is not sufficient for manufacturers to simply state that users should keep a distance from the phone.” CTIA said consumers need not be alarmed. "We follow the guidance of the experts when it comes to health effects," it said. "Following numerous scientific studies conducted over several decades, the FCC, the [Food and Drug Administration], the World Health Organization, the American Cancer Society and numerous other international and U.S. organizations and health experts continue to say that the scientific evidence shows no known health risk to humans due to the RF energy emitted by cellphones." The evidence shows that since the introduction of cellphones in the mid-1980s, "the rate of brain tumors in the United States has decreased," the group said.