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Lucille
11-24-2010, 10:59 AM
Travelers (Especially Men and Children), Beware: Urgent Warning from Scientists on TSA Machines’ Radiation (http://www.independent.org/blog/index.php?p=8610)


Independent scientists find the actual radiation exposure is 10 times TSA estimates, and argue that the health risks aren’t mathematically worth taking:
[...]
The scientists further detail their concerns for the health of:

* Older travelers > 65
* The female population especially sensitive to mutagenesis-provoking radiation leading to breast cancer.
* HIV and cancer patients
* Children and adolescents
* Pregnant women
* All men:

Because of the proximity of the testicles to skin, this tissue is at risk for sperm mutagenesis.

That's the government for you. X-ray techs' training runs from 18 months to four years, and are re-certified every two years. The TSA "professionals" have 8 hours training.

The states set the standards for testing x-ray safety and registration, but is usually every 6 months to a year. The DHS rolls these things out, uses them without safety precautions (http://open.salon.com/blog/jeffrey_dach_md/2010/11/22/airport_tsa_body_scanner_health_concerns), and God only knows how often they're tested.

I hate the government. It makes me sick, both figuratively and literally. (And then there's the TSA's nastyass gloves...)

jmdrake
11-24-2010, 11:16 AM
Thanks for the information. I brought up the health risk to an Obama supporter who was all "Why does anybody have anything to hide" about the scans. He couldn't argue against the health risks though. He also had to finally admit that this does nothing to make anyone safe anyway.

tangent4ronpaul
11-24-2010, 01:27 PM
Travelers (Especially Men and Children), Beware: Urgent Warning from Scientists on TSA Machines’ Radiation (http://www.independent.org/blog/index.php?p=8610)



That's the government for you. X-ray techs' training runs from 18 months to four years, and are re-certified every two years. The TSA "professionals" have 8 hours training.

The states set the standards for testing x-ray safety and registration, but is usually every 6 months to a year. The DHS rolls these things out, uses them without safety precautions (http://open.salon.com/blog/jeffrey_dach_md/2010/11/22/airport_tsa_body_scanner_health_concerns), and God only knows how often they're tested.

I hate the government. It makes me sick, both figuratively and literally. (And then there's the TSA's nastyass gloves...)

This is the first time I've thought some gvmt regulation might solve a real problem...

-t

Lucille
11-24-2010, 04:10 PM
This is the first time I've thought some gvmt regulation might solve a real problem...

-t

LOL... I know.

TSA X-ray backscatter body scanner safety report: hide your kids, hide your wife (http://myhelicaltryst.blogspot.com/2010/11/tsa-x-ray-backscatter-body-scanner.html)


Essentially, this means that the X-ray source used in the Rapiscan system is the same as those used for mammograms and some dental X-rays, and uses BOTH 'soft' and 'hard' X-rays. Its very disturbing that the TSA has been misleanding on this point. Here is the real catch: the softer the X-ray, the more its absorbed by the body, and the higher the biologically relevant dose! This means, that this radiation is potentially worse than an a higher energy medical chest X-ray.

With that being said, because the scanners have both a radiation source AND a detector in the front AND back of the person in the scanner, it is actually possible for the hardware to conduct a classic, through-the-body X-ray. The TSA claims that the machines are not; however, based on the limited engineering schematics released in the safety documents, they could be certainly be easily reconfigured to do so by altering the aluminum-plate (or equivalent) filter or by changing the software. So the hardware has the capability to output quite high doses of radiation, however a biological dose is a function of the time of exposure as well as the proximity to the source and the power of the power of the source. Unfortunately, it is difficult to determine which zones in the scanner are 'hottest' because that information is masked in the document. An excerpt of the safety evaluation from Johns Hopkins is shown below to give you sense of how much other information is being withheld. Ultimately my point is this: even though the dose may actually be low, these machines are capable of much higher radiation output through device failure or both unauthorized or authorized reconfiguration of either hardware or software.
[...]
Furthermore, when making this comparison, the TSA and FDA are calculating that the dose is absorbed throughout the body. According the simulations performed by NIST, the relative absorption of the radiation is ~20-35-fold higher in the skin, breast, testes and thymus than the brain, or 7-12-fold higher than bone marrow. So a total body dose is misleading, because there is differential absorption in some tissues. Of particular concern is radiation exposure to the testes, which could result in infertility or birth defects, and breasts for women who might carry a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation. Even more alarming is that because the radiation energy is the same for all adults, children or infants, the relative absorbed dose is twice as high for small children and infants because they have a smaller body mass (both total and tissue specific) to distribute the dose. Alarmingly, the radiation dose to an infant's testes and skeleton is 60-fold higher than the absorbed dose to an adult brain!

Brian4Liberty
11-24-2010, 04:40 PM
Because of the proximity of the testicles to skin, this tissue is at risk...

YouTube - Ow my Balls! Idiocracy (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_4jrMwvZ2A)