TSA RADIATION SCANNERS IN THE NEWS AGAIN

[karisu_sama]

Soooooo.... TSA now wants to back off from having an independent study of the health effects of full-body scanners, using the flimsy excuse of the "Homeland Security" Inspector General's report claiming they are "not harmful"? (http://www.cnn.com/ ( Read more... )

Comments

[johno]

That last bit is what I'm worried about.

I have friends who are TSA agents and they are near the machines for 8-12 hours a day, getting hit with hundreds (if not thousands) of backscatter hits from the scan.

I'd like the see the results of putting a test unit right where the agents usually stand and get a report of just how many rads it collects in a normal shift.

Just look at the images from that courthouse who saved all the scans. Work your day through the daily images and you see the same security folks *over and over* in the background. If the machine could see them so clearly, just how many rads were they getting?

[mmoneurere]

Yeah, I wouldn't be worried about the scanners...if I could trust the manufacturers to be even remotely honest about the actual range of exposure rates. Of course, especially given the environment in which even suggesting that maybe we should have some independent testing gets attacked...yeah, my trust in corporate honesty here is even lower than usual.

(As a side point -- while the exposure experienced by entry-level TSA employees is likely much lower than that experienced by a passenger for a single scan, it's those entry-level employees who likely get the highest total dose. These things add up -- I've started paying more attention since I started an internship where I'm required by a law to wear a dosimeter whenever I'm on-site. Radiation workers -- which includes just about everyone working in a hospital ward where nuclear medicine treatment or imaging is an everyday practice -- have a significantly higher lifetime cancer risk. But if they're already noticing a statistically significant cancer risk for people running the

[izmirian]

Yeah, an independent study is definitely called for here. Not that I think that a large danger is likely to be found but it's never a good idea to rely on a company to study and announce problems with its own products.