Scan or Grope?

[monster]

maybe I won't get into trouble after all

[glatt]

Some better comments on the safety issue than I can make: http://boingboing.net/2010/11/27/mol...biologist.html

And also a letter of concern about the safety of the devices sent by a bunch of UCSF PhDs to the Obama administration.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/defa...jph-letter.pdf

Basically if a handful of PhDs in the field have reviewed the public information on the scanners and are not convinced that they are safe, then what am I supposed to think?

Unlike other scanners, these new devices operate at relatively low beam energies
(28keV). The majority of their energy is delivered to the skin and the underlying
tissue. Thus, while the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume
of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high.


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 Xrays
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.

[Pico and ME]

Originally Posted by monster

maybe I won't get into trouble after all

And if I could hear his accent at the same time? Oh Lordy...

[monster]

I bet he's blushing......

[Shawnee123]

Originally Posted by Pico and ME

And if I could hear his accent at the same time? Oh Lordy...

Nyeah nyeah nyeah...been there done that!

'Course, monster ain't nothin' to sneeze at either. In fact, when we (monster et al) met for dinner some time ago my cousin was there and she remarked to me later "what a good-looking family!"

[Lamplighter]

RE: Glatts link in post # 32 above
Point (B) would be a difficult issue for TSA to prove the negative,
especially to a politically powerful group in the population.

B) A fraction of the female population is especially sensitive to
mutagenesis-provoking radiation leading to breast cancer.
Notably, because these women, who have defects in DNA repair mechanisms,
are particularly prone to cancer,
X-ray mammograms are not performed on them.
The dose to breast tissue beneath the skin represents a similar risk.

[glatt]

You would think that if a woman is told to never get an xray, she's not going to go walking into one of these machines. Of course, that's assuming she is aware she has the condition.

[footfootfoot]

Well supposedly Deepak Chopra is a key shareholder or owner fo one of the companies that makes the machines so it's gotta be safe. Am I right?

[Lamplighter]

My wife tells me the former head of Home Land Security, Michael Chertoff,
is invested in these scanners too, but this may just be a rumor from earlier times.

In light of Point (B) above, this quote from Chopra's Center's web page
could be read with quite a bit of irony.

"The inner self of every human waits patently until we are ready to discover it;
then it extends an invitation to enter the luminous mystery of existence in
which all things are ceated, nurtured, and renewed.
In the presence of this mystery, we not only heal ourselves, we heal the world."
~Deepak Chopra

[HungLikeJesus]

Patently?

[Nirvana]

Yah if Beest was a screener I would definitely go for the grope but this will probably be my screener and have the seat next to me on the plane...

[monster]

That's Richlevy!

[DanaC]

I agree with Clod and Glatt.

If you;d have asked me last year I'd have said scan for sure. But all that stuff about it potentially fucking with people's dna sounds well dodgy to me.

[sexobon]

Additionally, a guy being groped can turn his head to the side and cough to get a free hernia test.

[Beest]

Originally Posted by glatt

Once some trusted entity other than the TSA shows them to be safe, I'll change my tune. But I don't trust the TSA at all to tell the truth.

The source I linked was the UK Health and Safety Authority (OSHA equivalent), I tried to lookup the NRPB (national Radiological Protection Board) where I did my training but it looks like it's been absorbed into the HSA.

It's the same stuff about exposure at altitiude.

This is the FDAs response to the letter from the PhDs concerning 'skin dose', it's a point by point smackdown.

The stated concern was, “The majority of their energy is delivered to the skin and the underlying tissue.” We agree. However, the concern that “the dose to the skin may be dangerously high” is not supported. The recommended limit for annual dose to the skin for the general public is 50,000 µSv. The dose to the skin from one screening would be approximately 0.56 µSv when the effective dose for that same screening would be 0.25 µSv. Therefore the dose to skin for the example screening is at least 89,000 times lower than the annual limit.

Other specific concerns expressed in the letter are based on the assumption that a screening results in skin or other organ doses that are orders of magnitude higher than the effective dose per screening. The dose to other organs is less than, equal to, or at most approximately three times the effective dose for the deployed product. The annual dose limit for security screening is the same as the NCRP recommendations for the annual effective dose limit for the general public including special populations. An individual would have to receive more than 1000 screenings to begin to approach the annual limit.

The testing by the FDA and NIST calculates very carefully how much skin exposure you get and it's a lot less than by natural sources. One fun thing to do is to turn on my Geiger counter, which makes a beep every time some radiation passes, it will beep away merrilly every few seconds just about anywhere, cosmic rays pass thorugh us all the time

One teensy caveat, the whole field of relating radiation exposure to health risk is based on studying accidental exposures, you can't just irradiate a bunch of people and see who gets cancer (well not any more, see the military personell at early bomb tests). The biggest study group is Japanese victims of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima detonations, also early bomb test where a lot of military perosnell were exposed. A couple of years ago they halved all the exposure limits when they figured out the humidty of the air over Hiroshima was different to what had been previously thought so the basic exposure data was wrong.