Full-Body Scanners Increase Cancer Risk

Whole body scans of healthy people will create more problems than they solve by exposing healthy people to radiation. The risk for radiation over-exposure may be small for a single subject, but the number subject exposed to airport body scans will increase the risk by the millions. A normal CT scan of the chest is the equivalent of about 100 chest X-rays. Some scanners are equivalent of 440 conventional X-rays. The traditional X-ray machine detects hard and soft materials by the variation in transmission through the target. The backscatter X-ray detects the radiation that reflects back from the target. Several studies have suggested that people have been unnecessarily exposed to radiation from CTs or have received excessive amounts of radiation. A person undergoing a backscatter scan receives approximately 0.005 – 0.009 millirems of radiation. 1 mrem per year is a negligible dose of radiation, and 25 mrem per year from a single source is the upper limit of safe radiation exposure. Widespread overuse of body scanners and variations in radiation caused by different machines could subject many to radiation doses that could ultimately lead to thousands of new cancer cases and deaths.

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