Personal Communicator User's Guide

FDA Update for Mobile Phones
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In summary, we do not have enough information at this point to assure the public that
there are, or are not, any low incident health problems associated with use of mobile
phones. FDA continues to work with all parties, including other federal agencies and
industry, to assure that research is undertaken to provide the necessary answers to the
outstanding questions about the safety of mobile phones.
What is known about cases of human cancer that have been reported in users of
hand-held mobile phones?
Some people who have used mobile phones have been diagnosed with brain cancer.
But it is important to understand that this type of cancer also occurs among people who
have not used mobile phones. In fact, brain cancer occurs in the U.S. population at a
rate of about 6 new cases per 100,000 people each year. At that rate, assuming 80
million users of mobile phones (a number increasing at a rate of about 1 million per
month), about 4800 cases of brain cancer would be expected each year among those
80 million people, whether or not they used their phones. Thus it is not possible to tell
whether any individual's cancer arose because of the phone, or whether it would have
happened anyway. A key question is whether the risk of getting a particular form of
cancer is greater among people who use mobile phones than among the rest of the
population. One way to answer that question is to compare the usage of mobile phones
among people with brain cancer with the use of mobile phones among appropriately
matched people without brain cancer. This is called a case-control study. The current
case-control study of brain cancers by the National Cancer Institute, as well as the