Coffee isn’t likely to give you cancer after all, the World Health Organization’s cancer agency announced on Wednesday, and in fact, it might reduce the risk of some cancers.

Unless it’s really, really hot — like 150 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, or almost too hot to drink — in which case it might indeed promote cancer.

That somewhat confusing message emerged from the latest assessment of coffee and other hot drinks by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which periodically assesses the carcinogenicity of substances from red meat (“probably carcinogenic to humans’’) to the radiation from cellphones (“possibly’’ so).

Back in 1991, the research agency classified coffee as “possibly carcinogenic’’ to people. That determination was based on studies finding “limited evidence’’ that coffee drinkers had a higher incidence of bladder cancer than people who did not. The qualifier “possibly’’ reflected countervailing studies finding that coffee drinkers had lower rates of breast and colorectal cancer, and little evidence of carcinogenicity when lab animals were given coffee.

Looking to update that assessment, the research agency last month convened 23 scientists from 10 countries to reevaluate the carcinogenicity of coffee, as well as mate (a tealike, high-caffeine drink popular in South America) and “very hot beverages.’’

This time, the body of evidence exonerated coffee.

More than 1,000 observational studies have compared coffee drinkers to abstainers. The 23 scientists who were convened gave the greatest weight to research that followed coffee drinkers and coffee abstainers over many years. They also looked closely at studies that compared drinkers and abstainers at a single point in time but did a good job of separating out other factors that might account for any differences in cancer incidence.

The totality of such evidence produced “no consistent evidence’’ linking coffee to bladder cancer, which had been the chief concern back in 1991, the research agency said in a statement issued on Wednesday.

What’s more, a 2012 analysis of 16 individual studies found that coffee drinking was associated with a lower risk of endometrial cancer. A 2016 analysis of 12 earlier studies found that the risk of liver cancer falls about 15 percent for each cup of coffee drunk per day. And some 40 studies found either no connection between coffee and breast cancer or a slightly protective effect. And so it went for some two dozen other cancers.

All that led research to conclude “that there is inadequate evidence in humans for the carcinogenicity of coffee drinking.’’ But the agency did not go so far as to give coffee its “probably not carcinogenic’’ label. In nearly 1,000 carcinogenicity assessments, it has exonerated only a single substance — caprolactam, a compound used to make nylon — which has made it the target of vehement criticism.