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 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 Wi-Fi service, so “biologically, it’s not a new form of exposure,” said radiation oncologist John Moulder, who has researched the health effects of cellular device use.

And because a Bluetooth device is communicating with a cellular device just a few feet away and not to a distant base station, “it’s transmitting at quite a low power level,” said 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 percent of that energy as electromagnetic radiation, he said.

The unplugged user’s exposure to electromagnetic radiation “is absolutely minimal — smaller by a huge amount than the exposure of putting a phone to your ear,” said Foster.

Wearable fitness devices, which also transmit bursts of data over short distances, emit similar levels of electromagnetic radiation, Foster noted. And manufacturers of these devices have an interest in keeping their power-emissions low, he added: making them more powerful would only reduce their battery life, already a touchy issue with users.

The experts’ judgments do count on one crucial consumer reaction to the iPhone 7, however: that it drives more cellular device users to use earphones — wireless or not — more often. If iPhone 7 users decided to go all old-school, pasting their phones back up to their ears, said experts, they would be increasing their electromagnetic exposure and with it, their risk of health effects.

In 2011, the World Health Organization declared electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobile devices a “possible carcinogen.” Extensive efforts to nail down those risks, however, have proven inconclusive so far. The preliminary findings of a U.S. government-funded study, released in May, suggested that male rats exposed to high levels of radiation like that emitted by mobile devices are at greater risk of developing cancers of the brain and the heart. But that study met with widespread criticism.

Moulder, an emeritus professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin, says that at its highest dose, the electromagnetic radiation exposure received by rats in May’s report by the U.S. National Toxicology Program “was 50 to 100 times what you would get from using a mobile phone, and they were exposed 18 hours a day for two years” — essentially their whole life, starting before birth.