My Helical Tryst: Review of the TSA X-ray backscatter body scanner safety report: hide your kids, hi

[autographedcat]

I've been reluctant to weigh in on the TSA scanners because there simply wasn't enough data, pro or con, to really make a decision about their safety. Jason Bell goes a long way towards giving us more hard data to consider, and it's somewhat alarming.

I still maintain that the real problem with this sort of thing is that it doesn't actually improve the safety of air travel to any meaningful degree, unless the object is to make flying so onerous that no one bothers to do it anymore.

My Helical Tryst: Review of the TSA X-ray backscatter body scanner safety report: hide your kids, hide your wife

Last spring, a group of scientists at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) including John Sedat Ph.D., David Agard Ph.D., Robert Stroud, Ph.D. and Marc Shuman, M.D. sent a letter of concern to the TSA regarding the implementation of their 'Advanced Imaging Technology', or body scanners as a routine method of security screening in US airports. Of specific concern is the scanner that uses X-ray back-scattering. In the letter they raise some interesting points, which I've quoted below:

"Our overriding concern is the extent to which the safety of this scanning device has been adequately demonstrated. This can only be determined by a meeting of an impartial panel of experts that would include medical physicists and radiation biologists at which all of the available relevant data is reviewed."

"The X-ray dose from these devices has often been compared in the media to the cosmic ray exposure inherent to airplane travel or that of a chest X-ray. However, this comparison is very misleading: both the air travel cosmic ray exposure and chest X-rays have much higher X-ray energies and the health consequences are appropriately understood in terms of the whole body volume dose. In contrast, these new airport scanners are largely depositing their energy into the skin and immediately adjacent tissue, and since this is such a small fraction of body weight/vol, possibly by one to two orders of magnitude, the real dose to the skin is now high."

"In addition, it appears that real independent safety data do not exist."

"There is good reason to believe that these scanners will increase the risk of cancer to children and other vulnerable populations. We are unanimous in believing that the potential health consequences need to be rigorously studied before these scanners are adopted."

Comments

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I want all the officials and bureaucrats and politicians who are pushing for this to have to go through it themselves. Apparently they are all exempt, what a surprise, it's "one law for you and anothe for us". They say it's so safe, let them prove it by going through it several hundred times each (and then wait a decade or two to see what delayed symptoms occur) before they force it on the rest of the population.

Personally, I don't care if they see my 'junk'. I understand that there are lots of people who do care (I know a fair number of transexuals, and people with medical problems they woukd rather not let strangers see), but if anyone wants to look at me naked that's their problem (just don't blame me if the sight gives them nightmares). The thing which worries me is the medical problem -- I'm enough of a scientist to not be scared of 'radiation'[1] as a generic term, but X-rays which concentrate in the skin and the lack of peer review by experts in the field are a different matter.

[1] Too many people don't distinguish types of radiation. Only the other day I heard someone on the radio comparing mobile phone RF radiation to beta radiation from C-14 decay to hard gamma and saying "it's all the same, it's radiation and therefore bad" without any idea of the energies and effects involved.