Many people have been disturbed by new TSA passenger screening. After last year’s “underwear bomber”, TSA decided to examine passengers most private parts, either by rather intimate hand searches or radiation. Not because I believe there are more effective ways to screen large numbers of airline passengers or as any political statement, but for your own health I urge you not to go through the scanners.
Not because I believe there are more effective ways to screen large numbers of airline passengers or as any political statement, but for your own health I urge you not to go through the scanners.
The headlines have only recently included a series of tragic incidents involving hospital radiation equipment giving patients lethal doses of radiation. Personally I have much much less confidence that TSA workers, with maybe 1% as much training as hospital employees working with radiation, will operate these machines as safely as possible. Even if they did, I would refuse to go through the machine myself. A letter from UCSF radiation experts http://news.ucsf.edu/news-briefs/details/ucsf-scientists-speak-out-against-airport-full-body-scans/ warned of the unappreciated risks of this form of radiation.
Medicine and our society have long been willfully ignorant about the ill effects of radiation. Anyone remember having your foot size measured by xray? Those machine (fluoroscopy) expose people to so much radiation that we almost never use them in medicine anymore, let alone shoe stores. I have treated many patients whose athlete foot or acne was treated with radiation. I wish I were making this up. We have a remarkable capacity for ignoring what we’d rather not see, or, as one patient liked to say to me, “Denial is not just a river in Egypt”.
Please, enjoy your travels, but do not put yourself at needless risk.