With Social Media Addiction on Parents’ Minds, Scientists Draw Connection Between Cell Phones and Physical Ills

The phones are in children’s hands before they can read. Routers drone in nurseries and classrooms. 5G antennas are bolted to lamp posts outside apartment windows, feet from where families sleep. Still, the federal safety limits governing emission rules were written when the internet ran over phone lines.A peer-reviewed study published in March in the journal Environmental Health concludes that current safety limits for radiofrequency radiation emitted by cellphones, Wi-Fi routers, smart meters, and cell towers are severely inadequate to protect public health, with researchers asserting that permissible exposure thresholds are at least 200 times too high for public safety.The findings are the latest jolt to a debate that has simmered for decades, driven by an expanding body of independent science, a landmark federal court ruling, and a new willingness within the government to ask questions once considered settled.The regulatory framework is not just outdated, it is fundamentally broken, say advocates challenging the Federal Communications Commission to renew guidelines it established 30 years ago.“The FCC’s antiquated 1996 limits do not protect for cancer, sperm damage, impacts to brain development, endocrine system impacts, nor do they consider impacts to wildlife, especially pollinators,” the director of the wireless and EMF program at the scientific nonprofit Environmental Health Sciences, Theodora Scarato, told The New York Sun.The FCC’s wireless radiation exposure limits have not been updated or fully reviewed by federal health and safety agencies since they were set in 1996, when the average American spent six minutes per day on a cell phone. That number is now four and a half hours per day for the 98 percent of Americans who own a smartphone.Safety advocates say that FCC limits designed to protect only against short-term radiofrequency radiation exposure, not long-term exposure, also rest on a deeply flawed assumption: that radiofrequency radiation only harms the body by heating tissue.Decades of scientific research since the limits were set show non-thermal biological effects, including links to cancer, oxidative stress, neurological damage, and reproductive harm, many occurring at exposure levels far below the FCC’s so-called safe threshold.Not everyone agrees that the current limits require an emergency overhaul. Several scientific and public health bodies, including the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection and the American Cancer Society, have long maintained that radiofrequency radiation below thermal thresholds has not conclusively been shown to cause harm in humans.Emeritus professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, Kenneth Foster, has noted that “people have been using cell phones for decades and so far there has been no noticeable increase in brain cancer,” suggesting that any risk, if it occurs at all, is too low to detect with any reliability.A professor of cancer prevention at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Timothy Rebbeck, also said a 2024 review by the World Health Organization “confirms what we have known for quite a while,” which is that cancer risks do not appear elevated from these exposures.Yet, even those who dispute the urgency of reform acknowledge that the science remains unsettled, and that the federal government has largely stopped asking the question. The Environmental Protection Agency, originally tasked with setting wireless safety limits, was defunded from that role in the 1990s and never replaced. “The limits were established from acute studies of a single effect in small groups of experimental animals,” said a retired senior toxicologist who led the National Institute of Health’s own study of cell phone effects, Ron Melnick.Mr. Melnick, who directed special programs in the Environmental Toxicology Program at NIH’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and conducted the government’s $30 million National Toxicology Program study on cell phones, noted that hundreds of subsequent studies demonstrate that current exposure limits are not adequate to protect the public, “especially children.”In 2021, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the decision to keep limits unchanged was “arbitrary and capricious,” and ordered the agency to explain why it has not addressed health risks from long-term exposure, reproductive and neurological effects, children’s heightened vulnerability, and environmental impacts.The court ordered the FCC to provide a reasoned explanation for retaining its 1996 standards. As of this year, it still has not complied, which the current president of the lead petitioner in the suit, Environmental Health Trust, says needs to be rectified.“The FCC and the FDA have been under a federal court order in EHT v. FCC since 2021 mandating that they address the science regarding harms to humans and the environment,” President Joseph M. Sandri Jr. said. “It is past time for these agencies to comply with the law or face a writ of mandamus compelling them to do so.”What the science now showsThe National Toxicology Program’s years-long animal study on long-term radiofrequency radiation exposure — completed in 2018 — found DNA damage, increased brain tumors, and increased heart tumors in mice and rats, with results characterized as clear evidence of cancer. The Ramazzini Institute subsequently found the same tumor types at exposure levels mimicking those of cell tower radiation.In 2025, a World Health Organization-commissioned systematic review reported high-certainty scientific evidence linking wireless radiofrequency radiation to gliomas in the brain and malignant schwannomas in the heart. This was in contradiction to the same organization’s 2024 deep dive singling out 63 studies that found that brain cancer rates have not risen at the rates matching wireless technology’s deployment. But as far back as 2011, the WHO’s own International Agency for Research on Cancer classified wireless radiation as a possible carcinogen. An adjunct professor of biochemistry at the University of Helsinki, Dariusz Leszczynski, who participated in the 2011 evaluation, told the Sun that science has long since moved past that designation. “Currently, the animal data have become much stronger and indicate that, in certain situations, humans might be at risk of developing cancer from wireless exposures,” said Mr. Leszczynski, who serves as chief editor of the journal “Radiation and Health” at Frontiers in Public Health. “It should be taken seriously, as toxicology data, and not dismissed because ‘rats are not humans’ and similar trivial reasoning.”The fertility data is troubling in its own right. Multiple studies published in 2024 and 2025 report that radiofrequency exposure from cell phones carried in trouser pockets is associated with reduced sperm motility, altered morphology, and decreased viability in animal models, with a WHO-commissioned systematic review finding moderate certainty evidence of reduced pregnancy rates in exposed animals.Research at the Air Force Radiofrequency Bioeffects Branch — using exposure levels permissible under current safety standards — has also found that high-power pulsed microwaves can generate intracranial stress levels with potential implications for brain injury. Excessive exposure has been central to widespread reporting about so-called Havana Syndrome and the use of microwaves as a targeted weapon. In 2025, the Air Force awarded a follow-on contract valued at nearly $40.4 million to continue research on the bioeffects of directed energy.Children, 5G, and the question nobody is answeringThe stakes appear most acute for the youngest users. While social media addiction has captured much of the public’s imagination, leading to bans on cell phones during classtime, a study in Mexico City published in Environmental Research found other alarming results: children exposed to elevated levels of extremely low-frequency magnetic fields, emitted by power lines, household wiring, and everyday electronics, faced more than double the risk of developing central nervous system tumors. An additional concern raised over the quality of the FCC’s scientific rigor relates to current testing using a mannequin representing a large adult male. Those tests, say critics, do not reflect real-world use or users.When France tested the iPhone 12 in 2023, it found that the phones exceeded European Union limits for specific absorption rate — the measure for tissue damage from heating. Apple issued a software fix that was subsequently extended EU-wide after the European Commission determined France’s regulatory response as justified. American regulators have not disclosed equivalent findings though a FOIA request response released in late 2023 revealed that cell phones tested at FCC labs also exceeded exposure limits when tested near the body, the way most people use a phone.A professor and chairman emeritus of electrical and computer engineering at the University of New Hampshire, Kent Chamberlin, told the Sun the gap between what regulators assume and what people actually experience is not an accident — it is built into the system. “The detrimental effects of wireless radiation exposure typically take place over time in a timeframe similar to smoking,” Mr. Chamberlin warned. “So, assessing the harm of wireless radiation exposure in an experiment taking an hour or less is ludicrous.”Long-term health studies on exposure from 5G at the population scale do not yet exist. Mr. Leszczynski said it is telling what that gap reveals. “We do not know how human physiology reacts to wireless exposures, not only 5G but all others too,” he said. “When not knowing biochemistry, all talk about confirmed safety is nonsense.” “It is reckless to continue rolling out 5G, and now 6G, without rigorous premarket safety testing, especially as these technologies introduce higher frequencies, more complex modulation patterns, and simultaneous exposure to multiple wireless sources,” added Ms. Scarato.The FCC has not responded to the court order, and its current chairman, Brendan Carr, has not commented on the relationship of wireless to public health concerns. Instead, he most recently announced that due to cybersecurity and supply chain concerns, foreign-made internet routers would be banned from sale in the United States.In January this year, the Department of Health and Human Services, under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., initiated a new review of the potential health risks of wireless radiation. Concurrently, the Food and Drug Administration removed webpages that had previously asserted cellphones posed no danger.With environmental radiofrequency radiation levels surging in Los Angeles and elsewhere to 70 times the levels recorded by the EPA in 1975, Mr. Sandri and others have suggested a continuous monitoring system and national database of antenna emissions akin to the air quality index. The last comprehensive federal report on ambient radiation was published by the EPA in 1986.Messrs. Sandri and Chamberlin liken the failure to develop safety measures as the same dynamic that delayed action on tobacco — concerns over culpability and the cost of compensation for those damaged. “The science documenting the harm of wireless radiation is crystal clear,” Mr. Chamberlin said, “and that harm is not being conveyed to the public for the same reason that the risks of smoking were not acknowledged decades ago.”

With Social Media Addiction on Parents’ Minds, Scientists Draw Connection Between Cell Phones and Physical Ills

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