WASHINGTON-A report in the May issue of Epidemiology cast doubt on whether pocket telephones pose fatal health consequences for consumers in the short run, but leaves open the question of whether long-term use of phones can cause cancer or other maladies.
The epidemiologic study, the first of its kind connected to radio frequency radiation exposure from cellular telephones, compared mortality rates among a quarter million portable and mobile cellular telephone customers with accounts at least three years old and found no increase in deaths among pocket telephone subscribers.
In fact, the research of Boston-based Epidemiology Resources Inc. found the mortality rate in 1994 of portable phone users was 86 percent of that of mobile telephone customers. The research was overseen by Kenneth Rothman, a epidemiologist with the firm who is part of the $25 million research effort the wireless industry is funding.
The significance of the comparison is that pocket phones are placed against the head where microwave exposure emanates from the antenna whereas antennas on mobile phones are located separately, usually somewhere on the vehicle.
“These early results offer some reassurance, specifically that a large increase in mortality is not associated with radio frequency exposures over the short term.” said Patricia Buffler, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, in an editorial accompanying the research.
Yet, Buffler noted that “current available research findings are insufficient to conclude that there are no long-term adverse health effects-either from handheld wireless communication devices or from cellular towers. This lack of evidence neither establishes the absence of an effect nor provides grounds for presuming that a hazard exists. It is this crucial gap that a large, new epidemiologic study of cellular users seeks to address.”
Currently, a debate is raging in industry and government about setting stricter RF radiation exposure guidelines. The Federal Communications Commission is required by the new telecommunications law to have final guidelines in place by early August.
In 1993, the FCC proposed to embrace RF radiation guidelines updated by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers in 1991 and adopted by the American National Standards Institute the following year.
Now there are signs that rather than adopting the 1992 IEEE/ANSI standard entirely, the FCC may incorporate 1986 exposure criteria advocated a decade ago by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements.
The Environmental Protection Agency, which considered establishing RF radio exposure guidelines in the 1980s before dropping the initiative for fiscal reasons, backs the NCRP exposure criteria over the IEEE/ANSI standard.
EPA officials claim that as an agency that deals with health issues they are better positioned than industry to evaluate any health risks.
