Thank you very much for the link, petaluma1. I just read it and, although it is not a peer-reviewed scientific article, it appears to be a well thought of and conducted study which is designed to measure typical radiation doses, but not determine effectiveness, or their reliability in terms of operating as they should.

The results are a relief for me: they indicate doses are reasonably low, and penetrability on the skin is low enough that most of the ionizing radiation is gone by the time live cells (those that can become cancerous) are reached. It does not address a safety point I consider important which is mucosa (such as lips) and corneas. But still, it is good to know that doses are low enough that their use until today is not going to tragically increase skin cancer in the flying population. Cataracts are still a possibility.

All this of course should have been established before implementation.

Having said that, it is still ionizing radiation, and it brings no medical benefit whatsoever, and does not help catch terrorists (check the TSA blog to confirm they never catch anything using full body scanners that wouldnīt show up with metal detectors). Therefore, even if it causes a single case of skin cancer (and those doses multiplied by the number of flyers definitely will cause a few cases), I find that unacceptable medically.

Also, the worst point for me (and which pertains to MMW too) is that they simply donīt work. There are plenty of ways to bring dangerous objects such as guns through them undetected (false negatives) and many false positives with anything on the body surface, inconveniencing innocent people, and invasively pointing out medical issues (prosthesis, ostomies, adult diapers, disfigurements, medical devices, etc) that no one within the TSA should need to know about.