Can you get cancer for standing in front of a working microwave?

may i ask u 1 question who told this to you it is wrong.carcinogens are differnet stuff.if ur right then i have a reason we are not standing in front of the microvawe oven for hours just for a few minutes in that much span of time which is extremely less i don think we can get affected by cancer.just think.happy mylotting .

no not now, when they first came out it wasn't safe. but now they are ok to stand in front of.

No, this is not true. Microwaves at certain levels are, indeed, harmful to the human body (and other living organisms - if you have given your dog a bath DON'T put it in the microwave to dry it as one stupid pet owner did!) but microwave ovens are built in such a way that the waves are focussed on a particular area inside the oven and cannot usually leak out. Microwaves are simply a form of energy very like light. As with light, any thing which absorbs that energy is heated by it. In the case of light, we call that a black body; in the case of microwaves, it is mostly water which absorbs the energy. If you were to over-ride the safety mechanisms in a microwave oven and put your hand in, it would be cooked by the heat generated in it! Microwaves, in themselves are not 'carcinogenic' though it has been argued that prolonged exposure to non-fatal doses of certain types of electromagnetic emissions can cause cancer. X-rays, for example, are known to be dangerous; ultraviolet light (as from the sun) is another wavelength which is beneficial in reasonable doses but can cause skin cancer with over-exposure; the very small emissions from mobile phones have been held to be dangerous when the phone is held very close to the brain for long periods. One should clearly understand that a microwave oven is NOT dangerous unless it has been damaged so that the shielding does not work properly (the instruction manual will warn you about this). Food, or anything else, which has been microwaved does NOT contain anything apart from heat which is in any way different from the food you put in. There are NO 'waves' or 'radiation' remaining in the food once the oven is switched off!

depends on how often you are exposed to the microwave and it's power. When it's either some friendly reheating or someone decides to get close and personal to the microwave and watch some hardcore movie consisting of an food reheating. Either way, no you won't get cancer.