Interesting Information: April 20, 2011
Airport Scanner Scandal
The winter issue, 2010, of the Weston A. Price Foundation’s journal, WISE TRADITIONS, has an article on the danger with airport scanners (13-14):
In essence, Sally Fallon Morell and Dr. Mary Enig, in “Caustic Commentary” are saying that while these new devices operate at “relatively low beam energies,” the “majority of their energy is delivered to the skin and the underlying tissue.” The government is claiming that very low doses of radiation are safe, but Morell and Enig are saying that if the “low dose” was distributed “throughout the volume of the entire body,” it would be safer. However, “the dose to the skin may be dangerously high.”
Morell and Enig also note that four scientists from the University of California, San Francisco, have written to Dr. John P. Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, expressing “concerns about the backscatter X-ray airport security scanners, noting the lack of safety data and the probable increased risk to the elderly, children, and adolescents, pregnant women, and those at risk for breast and skin cancer.” These scientists specify concern for potential targets for damage, including the cornea, the thymus, and sperm. They note that comparing the X-ray dose from these scanners to cosmic ray exposure inherent with airplane travel or to a chest X-ray is misleading, in that air travel cosmic ray exposure and chest X-rays “have much higher X-ray energies and the health consequences are appropriately understood in terms of the whole body volume dose.” The airport scanners deposit energy into the skin and adjacent tissue, which is a “small fraction of body weight and volume, possibly by one to two orders of magnitude,” so “the real dose to the skin is now high.”
In addition, the scientists are worried that TSA personnel, who are already complaining about resolution limits, “might be tempted to raise the dose (www.npr.org/assets/news/2010/05/17concern.pdf).
Recommendations: TAKE THE PAT DOWN, REFUSE THE SCANNER, COMPLAIN TO YOUR CONGRESSMEN.
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