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Travel By Commercial Airline Carriers May Well Mean Close Encounters With Airport Full Body Scanners
The thwarted terrorist attack on a passenger jet heading to Detroit, where the would be terrorist had explosives in his under-wear, has got governments around the world preparing to install body scanners at airports in order to, hopefully, block any other suicidal terrorist from taking explosives onto commercial airlines.
Airport Full body scanners use one ot two technologies - millimeter wave sensors or backscatter X-rays. As the majority of body scanners installed are the backscatter type this article will be about these only. The question that both passengers and governments ought to be wanting to know but are not doing so is. Is the full body scanner safe to use? Will regular airline passengers who are scanned several times a year experience any damaging effects to their health?
X-rays:
X-rays, also called Rontgen Rays, are a form of ionizing radiation. If you have at any time had an X-ray you will be aware that whilst the Radiologists takes a X-ray he stands at the back of a radiation proof screen so as to protect himself from the ionizing radiation.
If you have had a X-ray when at the dental practitioners you will discover that the Dentist will also stand at the rear of a screen or leave the room while the X-ray is taken. Radiologists and Dental practitioners realize that exposure to X-rays can cause cancer.
As per Cancer Research UK. The proportion of cancers as a result of X-rays is 0.6 percent.
Mammograms:
Females at high risk -- individuals with a hereditary or familial predisposition to breast cancer -- who have received 5 or more mammograms during their twenties were found to be 2.5 times more likely to develop breast malignant tumors as compared to high-risk women who had not had any kind of mammograms.
Elderly women at high-risk increased their likelihood of having breast cancer by 1.5 times by having mammograms. Basically, in high-risk females, mammograms increase the chances of getting breast cancer. The greater the number of mammograms you have the higher the likelihood of getting cancer.
After examining the clinical evidence the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has published new suggestions concerning mammograms.
Specifically, that women under the age of 50 should not have mammograms unless that there exists a very good reason for doing so. That women above 50 should only get them every second year. The radiation from mammograms might be low-dose radiation but it is still X-rays. The same kind of ionizing radiation utilized in backscatter X-ray full body scanning equipment.
If having a mammogram raises the risk of a female having breast cancer then what about the amount of ionizing radiation a woman might be receiving if she were scanned using a Backscatter X-ray full body scanner each time she took a journey on a commercial airline.
CT Scans:
There is more than enough proof to demonstrate that exposure to X-rays is hazardous for your health. It might be recommended to reduce exposure to ionizing radiation as much as possible. One way to achieve this is to not have any unneeded medical X-rays. For example some individuals get annual full body CT scans as part of a yearly health examination.
As per a report in the New England Journal of Medicine one third of all CT scans will be clinically unnecessary. When you consider that during the year 2006, in the United States, there was more than 62 million CT scans, which means there were over 20 million needless CT scans done that year.
All airports will eventually have body scanners installed for security purposes. You may currently opt out of the airport body scanner and have a pat-down, however this may change any time sooner or later as airports would prefer everyone to go through the full body scanner.
In the event you fly regularly then, according to the medical research, you will be exposing yourself to X-rays which could cause you to suffer severe medical problems.
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