the IEEE International Committee on Electromagnetic Safety states that for frequencies from 3 kHz to 300 GHz: "a review of the extensive literature on radio-frequency (RF) biological effects, consisting of well over 1,300 primary peer-reviewed publications published as early as 1950, reveals no adverse health effects that are not thermally related" and "no reproducible low-level (nonthermal) effect that would occur even under extreme environmental exposures...harmful effects are and will be due to excessive absorption of energy, resulting in heating that can result in a detrimentally elevated temperature," such that at radiation levels low enough to avoid excessive heating it should be harmless [
9], [
10]. The use of low-level (less than 1μW/cm2) radiation in mmWave airport security scanners throughout the world on thousands of travelers is performed daily under the widely accepted view that the only potential direct biological effect of the nonionizing radiation in this band is heating [
11]. On the extreme of high-intensity human exposures, the U.S. government has investigated the use of very strong mmWave beams to cause heating of skin for the potential purpose of non-lethal crowd control and observed only effects that can be explained by thermal mechanisms [
12].
Nonetheless, given the importance of this topic to the wireless industry, we present this literature survey representing the most recent available results related to the biological effects of mmWave exposure, from the well-understood and well-accepted effects of thermal heating to recent reports of nonthermal effects and the attempt to motivate further discussion and research for appropriate emission standards.
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