Posted on 11/15/2010 12:21:52 PM PST by george76
Some US scientists warned Friday that the full-body, graphic-image X-ray scanners now being used to screen passengers and airline crews at airports around the country may be unsafe.
"They say the risk is minimal, but statistically someone is going to get skin cancer from these X-rays," Dr Michael Love, who runs an X-ray lab at the department of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at Johns Hopkins University school of medicine, told AFP.
"No exposure to X-ray is considered beneficial. We know X-rays are hazardous but we have a situation at the airports where people are so eager to fly that they will risk their lives in this manner," he said.
The possible health dangers posed by the scanners add to passengers' and airline crews' concerns about the devices, which have been dubbed "naked" scanners because of the graphic image they give of a person's body, genitalia and all.
...
The scientists say the X-rays could pose a risk to everyone from travelers over the age of 65 to pregnant women and their unborn babies, to HIV-positive travelers, cancer patients and men.
"Men's sexual organs are exposed to the X-rays. The skin is very thin there," Love explained.
The Office of Science and Technology responded this week to the scientists' letter, saying the scanners have been "tested extensively" by US government agencies and were found to meet safety standards.
But Sedat told AFP Friday: "We still don't know the beam intensity or other details of their classified system."
(Excerpt) Read more at ca.news.yahoo.com ...
When talking about abortion we suddenly have a “right” to privacy, but when getting blasted with X-rays and some obscure bureaucrat viewing your private parts on a monitor that “right” doesn't seem to matter anymore.
Could someone please explain the logic here? I always thought that consistency was a major part of the idea behind truth.
I wonder if these would have any effect on a newly developing baby.....???
The government allowed testing of atomic bombs in Utah and New Mexico in the ‘50s with no safe guards for those living where the wind carried the radioactive particles. We grew up east of Los Alamos and played in radioactive snow when we were children. We drank milk from cows that grazed on radioactive pastures. We have had enough government induced radioactivity, thank you very much, and many of our friends and relatives are already dead of cancer. We will never fly again if this foolish scanning adds to the radioactivity we have already accumulated in our bodies because of our government’s wanton disregard for our health.
Maybe I should walk through with a dosimeter badge. Yes, I could use the grounds that one of my clients is a nuclear power plant, another is a fuel processing facility. Use the reason that the company’s safety policy requires all employees associated with certain projects must have exposure logs (as in after so many millirems within a year, no more exposure situations for that year). As an officer in the company I can make such calls.
the evidence is mixed: some studies have reported significant genetic damage while others, although similar, have reported none. Now a team led by Los Alamos National Labs thinks it knows why. They say that although the forces that terahertz waves exert on double-stranded DNA are tiny, in certain circumstances resonant effects can unzip the DNA strands, tearing them apart. This creates bubbles in the strands that can significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication.
http://mikephilbin.blogspot.com/2010/01/airport-full-body-scanners-terahertz.html
If having these scanners in airports saves one life, it'll be worth it. < /sarc >
If you are concerned about radiation, don’t fly, scanners or no.
At altitude, the cosmic ray dose rate is over 200 uREM per hour and has been measured at 660 uREM/hour.
The radiation is gamma, xrays, and various particles including neutrons. Some comes from the interaction of the cosmic ray secondaries on the skin of the plane.
The xray scanner at the airport is limited to 25 uREM, or about 8 minutes sitting in your seat at 30,000 feet. And though the Fed limit is 25 uREM, the measured doses have been less, 9 to 10 uREM.
Background radiation on the ground is about 25 uREM/hour, depending on where you live, and is mostly from potassium 40 and Thallium 206. It’s much higher in some places, depending on minerals and altitude.
walk through with a dosimeter badge. Yes
**Airport body scanners not only show you naked, they also have the potential to wreck your DNA. The body scanners use terahertz waves to show your privates and terahertz waves rip apart DNA..**
http://www.infowars.com/terahertz-wave-body-scanners-destroy-dna/
Prohibition on unlawful search and seizure only holds for those who live under Islamic law and wear burquas to airports. All others (kufir) must submit.
Or pregnant women for that matter...
Make way for the lawsuits of being radiated
Yes.
our government’s wanton disregard for our health.
“Maybe I should walk through with a dosimeter badge.”
Yup, done that, a Landauer aluminum oxide crystal model, thje hexagon shape. They only respond if the total dose is over 1 mR. I did this on multiple flights, so they pick up the scan dose and the flight dose.
Results show that the dose on the badge scales to flight length, not the number of times I get scanned. The backscatter xray dose is limited by law to be less than 25 UREM, which is pretty small for a dosimeter badge to see.
When you do this, hold the badge in your hand- they yell at you to remove everything from your pockets and hold it in your hand, so you can carry your badge through.
If you leave it in your pocket, it will be scanned and record the dose in your pocket, at that point they’ll ask you to remove it and you can say sorry, I forgot.
From an article I linked earlier - they probably wouldn’t detect the “most hidden” kind of devices anyway:
Full body scanners will not be able to detect items inside a human body. Usually, these machines are used to scan and find out what is underneath the clothes and outside the human skin. They do not have the capability of X-ray machines to see inside a human body, despite the fact that this can be achieved but the radiation level will be too dangerous. Generally, the machines can’t find items hidden in a body cavity, so the scanners will not stop at least one common smuggling method used by drug traffickers. As mentioned earlier, terrorists nowadays are becoming more sophisticated and it is not hard to imagine them following in drug smugglers’ footsteps. As a live example in September 2009, a 23 year old Al Qaeda suicide bomber hid explosives in his rectum in an attempt to kill a Saudi Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef but because the bomber’s flesh absorbed most of the blast, he died and the prince survived.
Better locks just result in better lock-pickers.
I love how michael ironsides head exploded in scanners, but that’s just me.
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