Government says airport screening machines safe
The inspector general study “allays concerns for the flying public but not for the people working the equipment,” said Milly Rodriguez, a health and safety specialist at AFGE. “We don’t know their exposure,” she said. The inspector general report “essentially has no new information as far as we are concerned.”
The use of AIT scanners has increased since the Christmas Day 2009 attempt by Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab to blow up a plane over Detroit by detonating plastic explosives hidden in his underwear.
There are now two new types of body scanning machines being installed in U.S. airports. Both create an image of the surface of your body in order to detect objects hidden under clothes. One, the “backscatter” machine, which uses low-level X-rays, has raised health concerns. (The other, the “millimeter wave” machine, which uses electromagnetic waves, is less controversial.)
The Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) claims the potential for dangerous radiation exposure from the backscatter machine is low and that it doesn’t pose a significant risk to pregnant passengers. The agency says each scan emits less than 1/1,000 of the radiation given off in a standard chest X-ray, or the equivalent of two minutes of high-altitude flight.
But some medical experts have questioned whether the machines have been tested thoroughly enough and they’re worried about what would happen if a machine malfunctioned. If you have safety concerns or feel uncomfortable being scanned, the TSA insists that you can opt for a physical “pat down” search instead. You can find out more about the machines (known as Advanced Imaging Technology) on the TSA website.
In addition to the backscatter machines, the TSA has also deployed about 260 millimeter-wave machines which use radio waves and do not emit X-rays.
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CNN NewSource