Motorola C333 Specifications download pdf (Page 138)

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concern because of the short distance between the phone's antenna—

the primary source of the RF—and the person's head. The exposure to

RF from mobile phones in which the antenna is located at greater

distances from the user (on the outside of a car, for example) is drastically

lower than that from hand-held phones, because a person's RF exposure

decreases rapidly with distance from the source. The safety of so-called

“cordless phones,” which have a base unit connected to the telephone

wiring in a house and which operate at far lower power levels and

frequencies, has not been questioned.

How much evidence is there that hand-held

mobile phones might be harmful?

Briefly, there is not enough evidence to know for sure, either way;

however, research efforts are on-going. The existing scientific evidence is

conflicting and many of the studies that have been done to date have

suffered from flaws in their research methods. Animal experiments

investigating the effects of RF exposures characteristic of mobile phones

have yielded conflicting results. A few animal studies, however, have

suggested that low levels of RF could accelerate the development of

cancer in laboratory animals. In one study, mice genetically altered to be

predisposed to developing one type of cancer developed more than twice

as many such cancers when they were exposed to RF energy compared

to controls. There is much uncertainty among scientists about whether

results obtained from animal studies apply to the use of mobile phones.

First, it is uncertain how to apply the results obtained in rats and mice to

humans. Second, many of the studies that showed increased tumor

development used animals that had already been treated with cancer-

causing chemicals, and other studies exposed the animals to the RF

virtually continuously—up to 22 hours per day.

For the past five years in the United States, the mobile phone industry has

supported research into the safety of mobile phones. This research has

resulted in two findings in particular that merit additional study:

In a hospital-based, case-control study, researchers looked for an

association between mobile phone use and either glioma (a type of

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Motorola C333 Specifications Page 138