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Because the government told you so. Tell that to a cancer survivor. Studies are being done by independent groups that show it's not as insignificant as your govt leads you to believe! You go ahead through that scanner, and I'll opt out. Luckily for me, I haven't encountered a scanner on any of my recent flights and I fly several times a month.
Of course, because the government said so. The government also told workers at the World Trade Center site post-9/11 that the air was "safe to breathe."
Because the government told you so. Tell that to a cancer survivor.
I'm trying to make sense of this. Are you trying to say that because there are people who get cancer it is not possible to have an insignificant amount of radiation?
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You go ahead through that scanner, and I'll opt out. Luckily for me, I haven't encountered a scanner on any of my recent flights and I fly several times a month.
Fair 'nuff. I don't encounter them all the time either although they are definitely more and more, some security check points are about 50/50 now on xray versus metal. Happy travels, be safe.
But a representative for Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory said the group did not evaluate the advanced imaging machines for passenger safety. "That was not our role," spokeswoman Helen Worth said. "We measured the level of radiation, which was then evaluated by TSA."
My instincts tell me if I am a frequently flying passenger, a pilot, or a flight attendant, I should be concerned about being radiated multiple times weekly.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I am actually more worried about what will happen when the scanners aren't working properly. These scanners aren't being run by trained medical personnel, they are being run by a low paid TSA employee with a HS diploma or GED equivalent with no knowledge of radiology. Do they calibrate the scanners? How often?
I fear for the poor passenger(s) who experience a malfunction, particularly if it is a small child, as well as the TSA employee standing next to the thing all day considering what the Johns Hopkins report states about the entry and exit areas of the machines.
I just don't have enough scientific information about it to feel safe, and the TSA isn't releasing any data for peer review (by scientists and academics in the field) which concerns me.
Did I miss the reminder why nurses, radiation techs, and other medical assistants walk behind a screen before they press the button on that machine you're in at the doctor's office or hospital?
No amount of extra irradiating of any kind is acceptable to me.
Oh, I don't know if someone else on the multiple threads on TSA going here on CD has posted these, so I'm sharing, just for Slackjaw.
If you opt for the pat down in personal places instead of the radiation besure you ask the screener to "change" their gloves. You don't need to get whatever infection the person ahead of you might have.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I am actually more worried about what will happen when the scanners aren't working properly. These scanners aren't being run by trained medical personnel, they are being run by a low paid TSA employee with a HS diploma or GED equivalent with no knowledge of radiology. Do they calibrate the scanners? How often?
I don't think it matters the education of someone who just has to push a button over and over, as I doubt they are doing much more than that.
I wouldn't put much faith in the dental assistant girl who takes x-rays of my face having much skill in calibrating their machinery either, I'm willing to accept that they probably have whatever licensing/maintenance/calibration schedule is called for. I don't know when they last calibrated the traffic light near my house, or the elevators and escalators I ride on, etc.
Did I miss the reminder why nurses, radiation techs, and other medical assistants walk behind a screen before they press the button on that machine you're in at the doctor's office or hospital?
About half are millimeter wave imaging machines, they use radio waves that are a tiny fraction of what your cell phone uses.
The other machines are backscatter x-ray machines, they are using radiation at much lower levels than hospitals because they are bouncing waves off your skin, not penetrating to see bones and organs.
Various independent studies have been done on them outside of Johns Hopkins, stealing from wiki:
- The UK Health Protection Agency has completed an analysis of the X-ray dose from Backscatter scanners and has written that the dose is extremely low and "about the same as people receive from background radiation in an hour"
- The Health Physics Society (HPS) reports that a person undergoing a backscatter scan receives approximately 0.05 μSv (or 0.005 mrems) of radiation; American Science and Engineering Inc. reports 0.09 μSv (0.009 mrems). At the high altitudes typical of commercial flights, naturally occurring cosmic radiation is considerably higher than at ground level. The radiation dose for a six hour flight is 20 μSv (2 mrems) - 200 to 400 times larger than a backscatter scan.
- "A passenger would need to be scanned using a backscatter scanner, from both the front and the back, about 200,000 times to receive the amount of radiation equal to one typical CT scan," said Dr. Andrew J. Einstein, director of cardiac CT research at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City.
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