Security Scanners do pose cancer risks

(First published in Technorati http://technorati.com/lifestyle/travel/article/airport-scanners-do-pose-cancer-risks/)
The risk of cancer due to the exposure to the x-rays emitted by these airport security scanners is not just a rumour. This is backed by comments by scientists and experts.

Yes, these scanners not only strip us in the name of security but also may give us the dreaded disease, cancer.

Scientists from the University of California, San Francisco were so worried about this risk that they wrote a letter to the white House Office of Science and Technology in April. According to them the doses would be safe if equally distributed throughout the entire body; however, the dose to the skin is dangerously high. Another matter of concern is if the machine or software malfunctions at a moment or if it stops at a point exposing a particular portion of a person’s body to intense radiation.

Dr Michael Love, who runs an x-ray lab at the Department of Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry at John Hopkins University school of Medicine said, “They say the risk is minimal, but statistically someone is going to get skin cancer from these x-rays”.

Dr. David Brenner, head of the center for radiological research at Columbia University in New York stated “"If all 800 million people who use airports every year were screened with X-rays, then the very small individual risk multiplied by the large number of screened people might imply a potential public health or societal risk," he said. "The population risk has the potential to be significant."

Agard, one of the scientists who signed the letter to the White House says” "Many people will approach this as, 'Oh, it must be safe, the government has thought about this and I'll just submit to it,'."But there really is no threshold of low dose being OK. Any dose of X-rays produces some potential risk."

"Ionizing radiation such as the X-rays used in these scanners have the potential to induce chromosome damage, and that can lead to cancer," Agard says

The other signers are John Sedat, a molecular biologist and the group's leader; Marc Shuman, a cancer specialist; and Robert Stroud, a biochemist and biophysicist.

Now the question is whether we should trust our government officials who have previously demanded that the images are not stored or printed. Now that the internet is flooded with leaked images from the US marshal’s office taken in a Florida courthouse, the trust regarding the privacy of the procedure is gone.

Now, in the face of these fears about the risk of cancer they are trying to assure us that the rays won’t harm us.

But can we believe that?