Travelling By Commercial Air Carriers May Well Mean Close Encounters With Airport Full Body Scanners
The thwarted terrorist assault on a passenger jet traveling to Detroit, where the would be terrorist had explosives in his under-wear, has got governments around the world planning to install security scanners at airports in order to, hopefully, stop any other suicidal terrorist from taking explosives onto commercial airlines.
Airport Security scanners use one ot two technologies - millimeter wave sensors or backscatter X-rays. As the majority of full body scanners installed are the backscatter type this article will be about them. The question that both passengers and governments should be asking but are not doing so is. Is the full body scanner safe to use? Will regular airline passengers who are scanned several times a year suffer any detrimental effects to their health?
X-rays:
X-rays, also called Rontgen Rays, are a type of ionizing radiation. If you have previously had an X-ray you will realize that when the Radiologists takes the X-ray he stands at the back of a radiation proof screen in order to protect himself against the ionizing radiation.
If you have had a X-ray whilst at the dental practitioners you will notice that the Dentist will also stand behind a screen or leave the room while the X-ray is taken. Radiologists and Dental practitioners know that exposure to X-rays can cause malignant tumors.
As reported by Cancer Research UK. The proportion of cancers caused by X-rays is 0.6 percent.
Mammograms:
Women at high risk -- individuals with a genetic or familial predisposition to breast cancer -- who may have received 5 or more mammograms during their twenties were 2.5 times more likely to develop breast malignant tumors than high-risk women who had not received any kind of mammograms.
Elderly women at high risk increased their likelihood of developing breast cancer by 1.5 times by having mammograms. Simply, in high-risk females, mammograms increase the chances of getting breast cancer. The more mammograms you have the higher the risk of getting cancer.
Upon examining the clinical evidence the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has made new suggestions regarding mammograms.
Specifically, that women under the age of 50 do not need mammograms unless that there exists a very good reason for doing so. That women over 50 should only get them every second year. The radiation from mammograms may be low-dose radiation but it is still X-rays. The same type of ionizing radiation utilized in backscatter X-ray full body scanning equipment.
If having a mammogram increases the risk of a female developing breast cancer then what about the amount of ionizing radiation a female might be receiving if she were scanned with a Backscatter X-ray full body scanner each time she went on a journey on a commercial airline.
CT Scans:
One can find more than enough proof to demonstrate that exposure to X-rays is hazardous to your health. It might be advisable to reduce exposure to ionizing radiation as much as possible. A way to accomplish this is to not have any unnecessary medical X-rays. For example some individuals have annual full body CT scans as part of a yearly health and wellbeing examination.
As per a report in the New England Journal of Medicine a third of all CT scans will be medically unnecessary. When you consider that throughout the year 2006, in the United States, there was over 62 million CT scans, that means there were over 20 million needless CT scans performed that year.
All airports will eventually have body scanners installed for the purpose of security purposes. You may currently opt out of the airport body scanner and have a pat-down, but this may change any time in the future as airports would prefer everybody to go through the body scanner.
In the event you fly on a regular basis then, according to the medical evidence, you will be exposing yourself to X-rays which could cause you to sustain severe health issues.
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