Yep. I also find a lot of people get very interested when you tell them the machines haven't been tested, that the FDA wasn't able to get its hands on an actual AIT, that nobody is inspecting them, point out that the clerks aren't radiologists, etc.

Excellent work. I am a physicist and radiation oncologist. I get enough exposure at work handing radiation sources. I do not need extraneous radiation from a trip.

One of my non-radiation MD colleagues asked me last fall about the scanners. Aside from it being "icky" as she described it, she wanted to know about the radiation levels. I gave her the known safety data and the radiobiology run down and expressed my real concern: The devices aren't tested daily, and we do not know what the radiation beam quality, energy or dose is, so the answers to her questions was: the risk is small but present and we really don't have data to judge the magnitude of the risk and since they are not quality/safety checked daily, neither does the government.

Single trip through or even a dozen trips through the virtual-strippers probably won't amount to much: sending an entire population through regularly, that's an entirely different probability curve. We should not do radiation experiments on mass populations. We did that already in the early days of human radiation exposures: radium exposure to skin in 1896 (Henri Bequerel), radiation protection movement in 1915, Alamagordo, WW-II, Bikini Atoll in post-WW-II. We know the results and there's no need to repeat it to see what very low doses do in mass populations when there are other equally ineffective devices that do the same thing.

Not all ionizing radiation is created equal.

Yet there are no longitudinal data.

I've benn doing medical research for 25 years and there isn't a single technology that I have had a role in developing that hasn't been tested to FDA standards. Since these devices are not considered medical but rather safety, they are somehow exempt?

My question is - what is it about backscatter people don't get and why is it that the TSA prohibits its employees from wearing dosimeters while all other professionals who work with radiation emiting sources are required by OSHA (1910.1096(d)(2))to wear one?

Have you ever seen a young female TSA agent standing within inches of the backscatter and wonder if she understands that we don't know for certain that she isn't getting enough of a dose to make risk free reproduction unlikely?

Well put. ^

I read the article and was astonished by the "six out of 100 million" statistic. If that is correct I don't see how anyone would want to walk thru one of these things. Unless I am doing the math wrong, this means that being a FF, I have a better chance of getting cancer from one of these machines vs. winning the Powerball lottery. (100,000,000:6 vs. 195,000,000:1) :eek: :eek: :eek:

True.



This is the heart of the problem. They are not state or federally licensed, either as medical or industrial devices.

Their operators are not trained or certified by any reputable authority in the use of radiation generators applied to humans. They are not placarded as radiation sources. And according to TSA documents, they are not QA tested on a regular (ie daily) basis prior to being used to expose humans. I don't know the technical (beam) specs of the machines. I had assumed since maximum backscatter was the goal, they were relatively low energy, broad beam devices. We don't know the beam currents, time on (repeat exams to clarify things?) and filtration either. I did notice on the "sample" images that tibia appeared dark, meaning less backscatter and more bone absorption. Bone absorption rises exponentially as x-ray energy drops below about 100 keV.


Or a boy TSA agent with the family jewels out there in the open and with only a few mm of skin to "backscatter" v. absorb the dose.

I am NOT a doctor and I could tell you that the Nude O Scopes aren't safe.

The flying public should be able to come to this conclusion based on these 2 items.
1. The tsa is stating that they are safe.
2. The tsa is buying them to keep the price down on other, less hazardous, but just as invasive, abusive and ineffective machines.

There are plenty of other reasons, even without peer testing of the machines, that people should refuse they be used, but this is enough.