Development of the wireless technology increases the electro-magnetic radiation in the environment that created great public concern on whether the radiation is safe or not.  There are many researchers have been studying this radiation of RF waves for many years for different frequency range. Apart from original research, there are several independent surveys and reviews conducted. This is followed by some organizations preparing guidelines to limit the EMF radiation. When any such standard is adapted into legal regulations by a country then that becomes practiced in that country.

The international Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) which is the official partner of WHO is one of the organization releases guidelines for limiting exposure to EMF. That guideline was incorporated into country-wise regulations for many countries including Sri Lanka. ICNIRP identifies three health effects caused by EMF. Only heating is identified as the adverse health effect for RF radiation while the other two are for low frequency radiation. Even though there are several research demonstrating adverse health effect other than heating, ICNIRP claims that those are not scientifically substantiated. It states that there are so many short comings in those research such as limitation in making comparison to realistic exposure environment, difficulty in relating the in-vitro animal study to human, selection bias, reporting bias, information bias, reverse causality and exposure miscalculation. Accordingly, ICNIRP claims that as long as the radiation is within the limit defined by their standard there is no harmful effects. Similarly, some other country-based standards such as FCC by USA and ARPANSA by Australia are also claiming that as long as the radiation is within their specified limit there is no harm. The allowable limits specified by FCC and ARPANSA are also almost same as that of ICNIRP.

However, there are some other independent groups, namely Building biology standards, Bioinitiative and Australian Medical Association define limits on guidelines considering non-thermal effects. Their limits are much less than that of ICNIRP. There are several counter arguments against considering only the thermal effect for RF EMF. Further, International agency for research on cancer (IARC) classifies RF EMF as possibly carcinogenic (Group 2B) to human in 2011. The reason to classify in that category is because of limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans.

Since there are still no consensus among the researchers on whether to consider non-thermal effect of RF EMF it is very confusing for general public to assess their safety. One possible way to deal with this situation is to take some precautionary actions without compromising the technological advantage of the wireless technology. Few such simple measures could be not to use a mobile phone when a normal wired phone is available, to use ear phone or speaker mode when having long chat, making calls where reception is good, turning off the wifi during night time, not to use mobile phone as alarm clock and switching to air plane mode when giving it to kids to play games or to watch downloaded videos.