With a $25 million price tag, the multi-year study is one of the biggest government undertakings in the search to answer a question with potentially huge implications for society at large. The National Toxicology Program’s Dollars 25 million study is one of the biggest experiments into the health effects of mobile radiation.
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The National Institutes of Health study bombarded rats with mobile phone radiation from the womb through the first two years of life for nine hours a day. The FCC sets that limit at 1.6 watts per kilogram.
The high exposure cellphone radiation caused most male rats to develop heart and brain tumors.
The more intense the radiation, the more incidences of cancer.
He noted that “these exposures were done to the whole body of the animals, and that of course is different than the exposure one would receive from a cellphone which would be held next to a much smaller area of the head”. “It may well be that current cellphone use is safe”. “We seriously have to look at this issue again in considerable detail”. While the rats in the control group were not exposed to radiation and did not grow either kind of malignant tumor, for some reason they died earlier than those exposed to the radiation. Second, these are just the preliminary findings-the full report has not yet been released and the studies haven’t been completed.
An outside reviewer of the research wrote, “I am unable to accept the authors’ conclusions I suspect that this experiment is substantially underpowered and that the few positive results found reflect false positive findings”.
“Federal researchers have rushed out results from a study that shows cellphone radiation might cause brain and heart tumors in rats”.
The study is thought to be one of the largest and most in-depth analyses of mobile phones and cancers, costing the USA government $25 million to carry out over the course of several years. Even though the exact nature of the link has not been finalized, the information has found only higher rates of cancer in male rates. Unlike the radiation given off by atomic bombs, the non-ionizing radiation emitted by phones is too weak to damage the DNA inside cells.
The National Cancer Institute’s study stated, “Their nervous systems are still developing and, therefore, more vulnerable to factors that may cause cancer”. Nevertheless, the team believes that their findings are important. And he said the study seems to focus on the small increase in tumors in males, not the absence of them in females “and does not reveal the level of scientific uncertainty in applying these data to people using their phones”.
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The closest scientists have come to highlighting a link was when the International Agency for Research on Cancer said, in 2011, that the devices could “possibly” cause cancer in humans. “Scientific evidence always informs FCC rules on this matter”.
