According to a recently released study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine this week, there is little to no health risk in using the full body scanners at the airports.
The article was based on a study that was geared towards determining what the risk may be from the backscatter X-ray type of scanners now in use at some airports in the security lanes. Over the past year or so, the Transportation Security Administration installed about 500 of the full-body scanners in U.S. airports and expects to put in another 500 by the end of 2011.
According to one of the article authors, Professor of Radiology Rebecca Smith-Bindman, University of California, San Francisco, a person going through one of the scanners gets about as much radiation as what they would get in either an X-ray or a CT scan. For example, when a woman gets a mammogram, they are exposed to what would be the same as over 4,000 airport scans, and if they got a CT scan, it would be the same as getting 200,000 airport scans. This shows that going through an airport scanner isn’t as potentially dangerous as some well known medical procedures.
Birdman added that air travelers got much more radiation from flying itself, and that walking through a full-body scanner was like being on a flight for a few minutes. Plus, she added that all of us are exposed daily to radiation from the sun and the Earth.
The study was done because of the concern of some doctors on whether or not the scanners are safe. The concern was that x-ray radiation can damage DNA, which would then increase a person’s cancer risk. When this was tested with the airport scanners, it was estimated that if 100 million people flew 750 million times a year, only an estimated six additional cancer cases would develop due to radiation from an airport scanner.
With all of these tests and comparisons, the bottom line was that the researchers say there is no noteworthy radiation threat from walking through an airport scanner.
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