No, Apple’s new AirPods won’t give you cancer, experts say

Consumer technology analysts have been calling Apple’s decision to leave the earphone jack off its new iPhone 7 a risky business move. But some potential users of the iPhone 7 wonder whether Apple is asking them to take on some added health risk as well.

Unless iPhone 7 users adopt a workaround that would let them plug their earphone into the device’s charging jack, they will need to don headphones or earpieces that connect wirelessly to their devices. But are there health risks to putting a radiation-emitting earphone device directly in contact with one’s head?

The answer, say those who have researched cellphones’ radiation emissions and their health effects, is almost certainly no. Just as you could while wearing corded headphones, you can harm your hearing by listening to music too loudly and get injured by walking inattentively into traffic. But wearing a cordless headset will not increase your risk of developing cancer, they say.

The frequency on which Bluetooth devices operate is not very different from those used by mobile phones or WiFi service, so “biologically, it’s not a new form of exposure,” says radiation oncologist John E. Moulder, who has researched the health effects of cellular device use.

And because a Bluetooth device is communicating with a cellular device just a metre or less away and not to a distant base station, “it’s transmitting at quite a low power level,” says University of Pennsylvania bioengineering professor Kenneth Foster. Apple’s model A1523 Bluetooth wireless iPods headset has an output of 10-18 milliwatts, and because it transmits in short, quick bursts, it transmits less than 1 per cent of that energy as electromagnetic radiation, he said.