With a seemingly limitless supply of music and podcasts available at our fingertips, it has become commonplace to use headphones while strolling through grocery store aisles, working out at the gym, or while cooking dinner. And over the last decade, millions of Americans have taken to using Apple AirPods or other wireless earbuds to do so.
As the devices have grown more popular, many people have argued they pose a safety risk. “Love your AirPods?” asked “Healthcenters,” an Instagram account listed as a business service, in the caption of a video post. “You might want to reconsider!” In the video, a man uses a radiation detector to show radiation emission levels of a pair of AirPods, comparing them to an earlier Apple design, the company’s wired EarPod headphones. “Radiation right into your brain, you’re gonna want to show your kids this video,” he says. “That’s 150, 160 times the amount of radiation with wireless earphones versus wired,” the video claims.
While wireless headphones do emit low levels of radiation, these claims are missing vital context. The amount and type of radiation emitted by wireless headphones are not dangerous or harmful to the person wearing the devices. Wireless headphones emit non-ionizing radiation, a different form of radiation for which limited exposure is not considered a health threat but Exposure to ionizing radiation—the type emitted from X-rays, nuclear power plants, and atomic weapons—can cause severe harm.
“It’s much more important to limit exposure to ionizing radiation, which occurs at frequencies in the ultraviolet band and above,” said Dr. Christopher Collins, a radiology professor at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. Ionizing radiation occurs when the energy from the radiation particles is strong enough to push out and remove electrons from the atoms it traveled through. When the radiation passes through material like human tissue, it can alter or damage the structure of DNA molecules, which can lead to radiation poisoning. While X-rays could be used to cause harm, the radioactive waves target only a small specific area, have relatively low energy levels, and are emitted only for a split-second—allowing us to determine whether or not we broke a bone without having to worry about radiation sickness. However, if exposed to a more powerful radioactive energy or for a greater amount of time, the damaged DNA strands can bring about cell mutation or cell death.
But any radiofrequency emitted from wireless headphones will not have that effect. Ionizing radiation “starts at about 2,900,000 gigahertz,” Collins told The Dispatch Fact Check, “or more than 1 million times the frequencies used for Bluetooth communications.”
Non-ionizing radiation—used in devices including microwaves, Wi-Fi routers, cellphones, and wireless headphones—lacks the energy to remove an electron, and instead causes atoms to vibrate together. This doesn’t mean non-ionizing radiation poses no danger—at high levels of exposure, the vibrations can quickly heat up the atoms which, while useful for making your frozen dinner hot and ready to eat, can damage or burn human tissue if exposed. “This is not common,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says on its website, “and mainly of concern in the workplace for those who work on large sources of non-ionizing radiation.”
As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) explains, “When [radiofrequency] energy is very strong, such as from radar transmitters, it can be dangerous. These extremely high [radiofrequency] energy levels are only found near large and powerful equipment, such as commercial long-distance transmitters mounted on communication towers.” While wireless headphones use non-ionizing radioactivity to transmit audio data to the devices, its frequency won’t bring harm to those wearing them. When it comes to radio frequencies produced by wireless headphones, Collins explained, “the only potential for harm is if the emission levels are so intense your tissues actually get heated up, so wireless devices are regulated to operate such that practically no heating can occur due to the wireless emissions.”
Wireless devices sold in U.S. markets must be formally approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “to ensure that they do not exceed the exposure limits when operating at the device’s highest possible power level.” For devices emitting frequencies below 6GHz and commonly carried on our bodies, including cellphones and wireless headphones, the FCC sets limits based on the specific absorption rate (SAR), the rate of which radioactive “energy is absorbed by the body.”
Because wired headphones transmit audio via the physical wired cables, they do not rely on nearly as much radiofrequency. And, even though Apple AirPods and other wireless headphones emit more radioactivity than wired headphones to transmit sound through electromagnetic waves, it is still not strong enough to pose any real harm.
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