Motorola A388 User Manual page 129

Digital wireless telephone
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any adverse health effects associated with the use of mobile
phones.
What kinds of phones are in question?
Questions have been raised about hand-held mobile phones, the
kind that have a built-in antenna that is positioned close to the
user's head during normal telephone conversation. These types
of mobile phones are of 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
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