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November 22, 2010 | Full-body airport scanners 'just as likely to kill you as a terrorist's bomb' | London: A leading US scientist has warned that full-body airport scanners are just as likely to kill you as a terrorist's bomb blowing your plane out of the sky. Installed at all major airports across the world, these machines could be hazardous to passengers' health as increased exposure to harmful radiation may cause cancer. Peter Rez, from the Arizona State University, has claimed that the scanners are redundant because you are just as
likely to contract cancer from the radiation, as you are to die in a terrorist
bomb on your flight, reports the Daily Mail. He said the probability of dying
from radiation from a body scanner and that of being killed in a terror attack
are both about one in 30 million. "The thing that worries me the most, is not
what happens if the machine works as advertised, but what happens if it doesn't.
A potential malfunction could increase the radiation dose," Rez said. He studied
the radiation doses of backscatter scanners using the images produced by the machines.
He discovered that the radiation dose was often higher than the manufacturers
claimed. He suggested that the statistical coincidence means that there is really
no case to be made for deploying any kind of body-scanning machine - the risk
is identical. "They're both incredibly unlikely events. These are still a factor
of 10 lower than the probability of dying in any one year from being struck by
lightning in the United States ," Rez added. Critics say the low-level beam used
delivers a small dose of radiation to the body but because the beam concentrates
on the skin - one of the most radiation-sensitive organs of the human body - that
dose may be up to 20 times higher than first estimated. The controversial technology
creates a full-body image which is fed to a computer in a private room. It picks
up all natural curves and bumps as well any potential weapons, which may normally
be missed by the traditional pat down. However, government agencies insist that
the technology is safe and say their tests show it would take 5,000 trips through
the scanner to equal the dose of a single chest X-ray. |
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