Do AirPods cause cancer? What the studies actually say about your earbuds

The twist: the “cancer” earbuds are now a hearing aid

In September 2024, the US Food and Drug Administration authorised hearing aid software for AirPods Pro. It was the first over-the-counter hearing aid software the agency had approved, and it runs on the same earbuds that, a few years earlier, were all over social media as a cancer risk sitting in your ears.

So which is it? A medical device for your ears, or a radio transmitter aimed at your brain?

The short version: there is a real danger in those earbuds. It just isn’t the one in the posts. The rest of this piece walks through both, in the same order as the video.

The claim: do AirPods cause cancer?

I’m not a scientist. I’m someone who reads the studies behind the scary posts. Last time it was 5G. This time it’s something a lot of us wear for hours a day.

I keep seeing the claim in roughly this form: AirPods sit deep in your ear canal, centimetres from your brain, beaming radiation into your head all day. And hundreds of scientists have warned about it.

That second part is checkable, so that’s where I started. I went and read what those scientists actually said.

Where the AirPods cancer scare came from

The story starts in March 2019. A Medium article asked whether AirPods and other Bluetooth headphones were safe. Days later, a British tabloid turned it into a headline about 250 scientists signing a petition that warned of cancer from wireless tech, including AirPods.

The petition is real. It’s called the International EMF Scientist Appeal, and more than 250 scientists from over 40 countries signed it. But the dates don’t line up, and neither does the content.

What the headline said

British tabloid· March 2019Headline · paraphrased

250 scientists sign petition warning of cancer from wireless tech, including AirPods

Below the headline · what the study actually found

The petition was written in 2015, before AirPods existed, and never mentions them.

• Written in 2015; AirPods came out at the end of 2016
• Names phones, cordless phones, Wi-Fi, smart meters and baby monitors
• Updated in 2019, and still no mention of AirPods
• The paper corrected its story the next day

SourcePolitiFact · 2022

As PolitiFact’s 2022 fact check sets out, the appeal names phones, cordless phones, Wi-Fi, broadcast antennas, smart meters and baby monitors. It doesn’t mention AirPods or Bluetooth earbuds at all. When it was updated in 2019, it still didn’t.

The paper corrected its story the next day. By then, the headline had already gone around the world. Three years later, fact-checkers were still answering social posts built on it.

The case for worry, stated fairly

A bad headline doesn’t make the underlying worry wrong, and part of it is reasonable. So it deserves a fair hearing before we test it.

• Earbuds really do transmit radio waves. That’s how the music gets from your phone to your ears.
• They do it from inside your ear canal, for hours, every day. Placement matters.
• A named scientist raised it. In that 2019 Medium article, Jerry Phillips, a biochemist at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, said in-ear placement exposes the tissues in your head to relatively high levels of radio-frequency radiation.
• The cancer agency has a label for it. As we saw in the 5G article, the WHO’s cancer agency classifies radio waves as “possibly carcinogenic”, Group 2B.
• A major cancer organisation hasn’t closed the door. The American Cancer Society says possible health effects from Bluetooth earpieces can’t be ruled out completely.

These are real scientists and real organisations making real points. So the fair thing is to test them against the physics, the measurements and the studies.

What’s physically happening: Bluetooth headphones radiation, explained

Your phone sends music to your earbuds as radio waves in the 2.4 gigahertz band. That’s the same band your Wi-Fi router uses, and yes, the same band as your microwave oven.

That sounds alarming until you remember the ladder from the 5G article. Radio sits on the bottom rungs of that ladder, far below the line where radiation carries enough energy to break DNA. That’s what “non-ionising” means.

Down on those bottom rungs, the one effect science has proven is heat. Enough radio energy, absorbed fast enough, warms tissue. That’s exactly how a microwave oven cooks your food: about a thousand watts of radio energy, trapped in a metal box.

So the useful question isn’t “is it radiation?” It’s “how much?”

Are AirPods safe? The radiation numbers

The answer is: very little. Start with how much power each device puts out.

• A phone on 4G can transmit at up to about 200 milliwatts, though in practice the network usually turns it down far below that.
• Most Bluetooth headsets transmit at 10 milliwatts or less.
• A microwave oven runs at about a thousand watts. That’s roughly a hundred thousand times more than an earbud.

How much? The numbers

Transmit power, from an earbud to a microwave oven

Bluetooth headsetmost: 10 mW or less

≤ 10 mW

4G phonemaximum, power class 3

≈ 200 mW

Microwave oveninside a sealed metal box

≈ 1,000 W

1 mW1 W1 kW

The chart uses a logarithmic scale, because on an ordinary one the earbud wouldn’t be visible next to the oven.

Power output is only half the story. Regulators also measure how much of that energy your body actually absorbs. That’s the specific absorption rate, or SAR, measured in watts per kilogram of tissue. In the US, the limit for the head is 1.6 watts per kilogram, averaged over one gram of tissue.

The study

REGULATOR

Swiss review of Bluetooth headset test reports

WHO

Swiss Federal Office of Public Health

DESIGN

Review of US test reports, measured at 0 cm

YEAR

2026

n

35 headsets

In March 2026, Switzerland’s Federal Office of Public Health looked at test reports for 35 Bluetooth headsets, in-ear and on-head, each measured pressed right against a model head. On average, the highest readings at full power were less than a quarter of the US limit. None went over.

The limit itself has a safety margin built in. For local exposure such as the head, it is set ten times below the level where heating could start to do harm.

That’s why health agencies say a headset actually lowers the radiation reaching your head on a call. The Swiss office puts it plainly: headsets generally emit less radiation than a mobile phone and reduce the head’s exposure. They move the phone, the stronger transmitter, away from your skull.

There’s one honest wrinkle in the Swiss fact sheet. Bluetooth comes in power classes, from 1 milliwatt up to 100 milliwatts for Class 1, and a Class 1 device close to the body can expose you about as much as a phone. The weakest classes give exposure the Swiss office describes as low and locally limited, and the headsets in its review often transmitted at 10 milliwatts or less.

What studies on actual people (and rats) show

Here I have to be honest about the gap first.

What we do have is decades of research on mobile phones, which put far more energy into your head than earbuds do. In 2024, a review commissioned by the World Health Organization, led by Ken Karipidis at ARPANSA, Australia’s radiation safety agency, pooled 63 studies. It found, with moderate certainty, that mobile phone use likely does not increase the risk of brain cancer.

Bluetooth has also been tested on hearing directly, in two small studies:

• Rats in Turkey. Yildirim and colleagues kept 32 rats, adults and newborns, beside an active Bluetooth headset for four hours a day, for forty days. Their inner ears showed no significant change.
• Patients in Italy. Mandalà and colleagues measured the hearing nerve of patients while they were in ear surgery. A Bluetooth headset changed nothing. A phone held right against the head did reduce the nerve’s response.

The study

PEER-REVIEWED

Bluetooth vs a phone, measured at the hearing nerve

WHO

Mandalà et al., Italy

DESIGN

Nerve recordings during ear surgery

YEAR

2014

n

12 patients

Both are small and short-term, so neither settles anything alone. But they point the same way as the physics: the phone is the bigger exposure, and the earbud is the smaller one.

Confidence meter: AirPods radiation and cancer

So, does the radio radiation from AirPods cause cancer?

• Does the radio radiation from AirPods cause cancer?

  STRONG· No: Consistent, well-designed evidence

  Physics, measurements and phone studies agree; no long-term earbud studies yet.

Scale: Disputed · Early · Strong · Settled. The word says how deep the evidence goes, not how dangerous something is. How the scale works

Strong evidence: no. Not settled, because nobody has studied earbud users long-term, and the Swiss health office says plainly that long-term effects can’t be assessed yet. But the physics, the measurements and the phone studies all point the same way.

The real danger: can earbuds damage your hearing?

If the radio waves aren’t the problem, what is? The thing earbuds are actually made to do: put sound into your ear.

Deep in your inner ear, in the cochlea, are about sixteen thousand tiny hair cells. Sound bends them, and that’s how you hear.

Loud sound, for long enough, damages them. And in humans, once they’re gone, they don’t grow back.

There’s no pain, and you often don’t notice it happening. The loss is quiet, gradual and permanent. That’s what makes it easy to ignore, and why it’s the part of this story that matters.

How loud is too loud for earbuds?

Hearing damage works like a dose: it depends on how loud the sound is and how long you hear it. The US workplace safety institute, NIOSH, says 85 decibels is safe for about eight hours.

The catch is that decibels aren’t linear. The scale is logarithmic, so every 3 decibels more means double the sound energy, and your safe time halves. NIOSH calls this the 3 dB exchange rate:

• 85 decibels: eight hours
• 88 decibels: four hours
• 91 decibels: two hours
• 94 decibels: one hour
• 97 decibels: thirty minutes
• 100 decibels: just fifteen minutes

How loud is too loud?

Safe listening time halves with every 3 decibels

85 dB

8 h

88 dB

4 h

91 dB

2 h

94 dB

1 h

97 dB

30 min

100 dB

15 min

0 h4 h8 h

And earbuds can go past that. When Health Canada researchers Keith, Michaud and Chiu tested nine music players with 20 different earphones at full volume, they measured 101 to 107 decibels. They also noted that in-ear buds have greater potential for high levels.

Workplace limits are written for a working day, though, not for your headphones. For everyday listening, the WHO-ITU H.870 safe-listening standard gives adults a weekly budget: the equivalent of about 80 decibels for 40 hours a week. For children and people who are more sensitive to noise, it’s 75 decibels.

How many of us are over the listening budget?

Quite a lot of us. In 2022, a team including Lauren Dillard and the WHO’s Shelly Chadha pooled 33 studies of young people aged 12 to 34. About one in four were listening to their personal devices at unsafe levels.

The study

PEER-REVIEWED

Unsafe listening in young people, worldwide

WHO

Dillard, Arunda, Chadha et al.

DESIGN

Systematic review and meta-analysis, 33 studies

YEAR

2022

n

19,046 people aged 12–34

Add loud venues such as concerts and clubs, and the team estimated that somewhere between 670 million and 1.35 billion young people could be at risk of hearing loss.

Apple’s own hearing study, run with Rick Neitzel’s team at the University of Michigan, found that about one in ten participants went over the WHO’s weekly headphone limit. In preliminary results from more than 160,000 participants, more than three quarters said they’d had tinnitus, a ringing in the ears, at some point in their lives.

Inside the ear canal: bacteria and noise-cancelling pressure

What about the ear canal itself? Two smaller worries come up a lot, and the evidence on both is thin.

Bacteria. A small 2008 study from Manipal in India, led by Mukhopadhyay, swabbed the ears and earphones of 50 young men aged 18 to 25. Heavier earphone users had more bacteria growing in their ears.

The sensible takeaway: clean your earbuds, and don’t share them. The study’s authors made the same point about sharing.

The noise-cancelling “pressure”. Plenty of people feel an odd pressure, almost a suction, when noise cancelling switches on. As far as anyone has measured, nothing is actually pushing on your eardrum. A 2024 student study at RWTH Aachen points to the likely explanation: your brain reading the sudden lack of low rumble, and the low-frequency sound that’s left, as pressure. The evidence is thin, but nothing suggests it does harm.

Confidence meter: hearing and the ear canal

Back to the meter, with three questions this time.

• Can loud listening through earbuds permanently damage your hearing?

  SETTLED· Yes: Decades of converging evidence

  Lost hair cells don't grow back, and earbuds can exceed safe levels.

• Do earbuds give you ear infections?

  EARLY· No evidence yet: Signals, not answers yet

  They carry bacteria, but nobody has shown they cause infections.

• Is noise-cancelling pressure hurting your eardrums?

  EARLY· Nothing points to harm: Signals, not answers yet

  Likely a trick of perception; the evidence is thin.

Scale: Disputed · Early · Strong · Settled. The word says how deep the evidence goes, not how dangerous something is. How the scale works

Loud listening permanently damaging your hearing is the one firm verdict in this whole story: settled, yes. The other two are early. Earbuds carry bacteria, but nobody has shown they cause infections. And the noise-cancelling pressure has barely been studied, but nothing points to harm.

Back to the FDA: AirPods Pro as a hearing aid

Which brings us back to the FDA. The authorisation covers adults aged 18 and over with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss.

In a US study of 118 people, those who set the feature up themselves got about the same perceived benefit as those fitted by a professional. The FDA reported no adverse events linked to the device.

So the most powerful thing in your AirPods was never the radio. It was always the volume. The same earbuds that can wear your hearing down can now help people who’ve lost some of it hear better.

What I take from it

None of this is medical advice. Questions about your own hearing belong with a doctor or audiologist, not an article.

Every study and fact sheet behind this piece is in the sources list below, so you can check my work. The video goes through the same evidence with the charts on screen. And the next one is another claim I keep seeing: the phone in your pocket, and what it does to sperm. I’ll read the studies, so you don’t have to.