TSA scanners cause cancer
Someone called. Pretty terrible. Even more terrible is TSA’s non-reaction to it and their utter disregard for their employee’s health. And: I also find it amusing (as in, horrifying) that they have redacted the John Hopkins recommended limit on how many scans you can have a year. Because we don’t need to know if we are too frequent a flier. After all, it’s only more radiation on top of the radiation you already get and can’t avoid while flying.
June 28th, 2011 at 10:23 am
If there were ever a committee formed to list phrases editorials were no longer allowed to contain, “we may never know if” should be a first-round pick. Even the writer sees the conclusion doesn’t follow.
June 28th, 2011 at 11:35 am
Our local TSA club didn’t seem very concerned when I noted their lack of dosimeters and probable OSHA violations when I flew last fall. Understand they’re wanting to unionize. Instead of benefits which they may not live to collect due to radiation exposure, TSA-ers should focus first on occupational safety. I would if it were me.
June 28th, 2011 at 12:29 pm
My worry for the TSA workers goes about as far as my concern for the North Korean soldiers who get cramps in their arms after whipping dissidents too much in one day.
guess it is what you get for trusting the federal government when they allow you to wantonly violate the rights of your fellow man.
June 28th, 2011 at 1:59 pm
Yes I hear this refrain from the apologists all the time. And I have no doubt that they are (willfully) ignorant that there is difference in the types of radiation and intensity/exposure period. My response to them? Hey why don’t you let me shine a laser directly at your eye for two seconds. Don’t worry, it’s not any more light than you would get watching TV for 2-3 hours.
June 28th, 2011 at 2:11 pm
In case it wasn’t clear, mine was sarcasm. Airborne radiation is unavoidable as part of the process — the screening BS is completely avoidable and not worth the added risk.
June 28th, 2011 at 2:49 pm
First, I was a Navy nuke for 9 years and I’ve worked in radiation areas for over twenty five years. While the TSA redacted the text in the document from Johns Hopkins, they didn’t redact the numbers on the illustration. That means we can work backwards to figure out a reasonable estimate of the b lacked out doses.
According to the illustration, the dose rate at 70″ is 1.6 urem per scan. Using the inverse square law, if we reduce the distance to 36 inches, we get a dose per scan of 6urem to the traveler. I chose 36″ as an estimate since the focal point of the exposure is located about chest high, but the whole body exposure will vary according to reason. A 3 foot distance would cover 6 feet, or head to toes. running the numbers, I come up with about 6 urem/scan for a traveler.
This is not an exact estimate, but a reasonable approximation of the total exposure.
Given 6 urem per scan, a traveler would have to be scanned about 12 times a day every day to exceed the 25 mrem guidance.
Let’s look at the most conservative estimate, that the scanner imparts a dose of 10urem, the legal limit. IN the worst case, a traveler would have to be scanned 7 times a day, every day, for the dose to reach 25 mrem.
For comparison, smoking one pack of cigarettes will give you an effective dose of 25 mrem.
One pack of smokes gives you the same dose as one year of 7 scans per day.
Are you going to quit smoking?
The point is that there are levels of risk in everything we do, and the TSA scanners to not rise to the level of even a mild worry as far as radiation is concerned.
The real danger is in the violation of privacy and the erosion of liberty. If people can’t get excited about that, then they deserve the government they are getting.
June 28th, 2011 at 11:10 pm
No amount of safety, no measure of security, NO NUMBER OF LIVES SAVED is worth sacrificing the founding principles of our nation.
This is (ostensibly still) the land of the free, not the land of the safe. Freedom means risk and 235 years ago, some people decided that given the choice between living safe lives of submission to authority, or taking their lives in their hands and being free, they would rather have liberty at the expense of personal risk.
Yes, if TSA stops doing what it is doing, planes may be blown up. Maybe we’ll have another 9/11. Maybe we’ll have 911 more 9/11s. It will be sad, people will be hurting and mourning. But that is the price we pay for liberty. When people say “freedom isn’t free,” that’s where that slogan comes from. When Thomas Jefferson said “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” it was not intended as some sort of anarchist screed. He was saying that sometimes, in order for there to be freedom for all, good people must stand against oppressors and, sometimes, sacrifice themselves in order to do so.
And for godsakes, nobody is even asking any American patriot to fall on their sword. What we’re talking about is the people standing up and saying “Enough is enough” to the TSA. Saying “If we have to choose between being less safe in the air and enduring the wholesale sexual assault that you neander-thugs perpetrate against us every day at terminals across the nation, then we’ll keep our 4th-Amendment rights and take our chances. Now get the hell out of our airports.”
Anyone who values safety over liberty is not espousing American principles and, in point of fact, this can be confirmed via the words of Benjamin Franklin himself. It’s been quoted a thousand times before but it rings absolutely true each and every last time. “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
America. Land of the free. Not “Land of the free, except in airports or when we’re really really scared, void where prohibited, some restrictions may apply.
June 29th, 2011 at 1:57 am
FWIW I am a radiologist and assuming that full-body xray units have been in place for a couple of years, the likelihood that anyone has developed cancer related to occupational exposure to them is astronomically low, much less multiple people. The only exception would be leukemias or other types of cancer commonly associated with radiation exposure, the article is nonspecific.
The grievances listed by the union in the article from Prison Planet (and if that doesn’t raise your BS antenna, nothing should) also include strokes, heart attacks and other complaints that are unrelated to radiation exposure. OTOH, cigarette smoking is related to a higher incidence of strokes, heart attacks and cancer. If you smoke, that is entirely your choice, but STFU about the health risks of whole-body scanners. I hate the scanners and when I had the opportunity to enter one I did not, I’d rather make it uncomfortable on the D-bag who has to examine me than submit to a body scan. No matter how I feel about the wrongness of the policy, the biological facts are that the levels of radiation used in those scanners do not even come close to approaching the levels known to cause cancer, particularly “cancer clusters” in a very small number of people and in a very short period of time as far as malignancies go.
Also, let’s not forget this is PRISON PLANET quoting UNION COMPLAINTS. That’s like distilled BS right there. Don’t be fooled.