Travel By Means Of Commercial Airline Carriers May Mean Close Up Encounters With Airport Full Body Scanners

Travel By Means Of Commercial Airline Carriers May Mean Close Up Encounters With Airport Full Body Scanners

The thwarted terrorist assault on a passenger jet heading to Detroit, where the would be terrorist had explosives in his underwear, has got governments around the world planning to install full body scanners at airports in order to, hopefully, put off any other suicidal terrorist from smuggling explosives onto commercial airlines.

Airport Body scanners use one ot two systems - millimeter wave sensors or backscatter X-rays. As the majority of body scanners installed are the backscatter type this article will be about them only. The question that both passengers and governments should be wanting to know but are not doing so is. Is the full body scanner safe to use? Will frequent airline passengers who are scanned many times a year sustain any unfavorable effects to their health?

X-rays:

X-rays, also called Rontgen Rays, are a type of ionizing radiation. If you have at any time had an X-ray you will know that when the Radiologists takes a X-ray she stands behind a radiation proof screen to be able to shield himself against the ionizing radiation.

If you have had a X-ray when at the dentists you will notice that the Dentist will also stand at the back a screen or get out of the room while the X-ray is taken. Radiologists and Dentists understand that subjection to X-rays can cause malignant tumors.

As per Cancer Research UK. The percentage of cancers caused by X-rays is 0.6 percent.

Mammograms:

Most women at high-risk -- those with a hereditary or inherited predisposition to breast cancer -- who may have received five or more mammograms during their twenties were found to be 2.5 times more prone to develop breast cancer as compared to high-risk women that had not received any kind of mammograms.

Older women at high-risk increased their own chances of having breast malignant tumors by 1.5 times by having mammograms. Simply, in high-risk women, mammograms increase the chances of getting breast cancer. The greater the number of mammograms that you have the greater the likelihood of having cancer.

Upon examining the scientific evidence the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has published completely new recommendations concerning mammograms.

Particularly, that women under the age of 50 do not need mammograms unless that there is a very good reason for doing so. That women above 50 really should only get them every other year. The radiation from mammograms might be low-dose radiation but it is nevertheless X-rays. The same type of ionizing radiation utilized in backscatter X-ray full body scanners.

If having a mammogram raises the chance of a woman having breast cancer then how about the amount of ionizing radiation a female might receive if she were scanned using a Backscatter X-ray full body scanning device each time she took a trip on a commercial airline.

CT Scans:

One can find more than enough proof to show that exposure to X-rays is hazardous for your health and wellbeing. It would be recommended to lessen exposure to ionizing radiation as much as possible. A way to achieve this would be to not have any unneeded medical X-rays. As an example some people get yearly full body CT scans as part of a yearly health and wellbeing examination.

According to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine one third of every CT scans are clinically not necessary. When you consider that throughout the year 2006, in the United States, there were over 62 million CT scans, this means that there were over twenty million needless CT scans carried out that year.

All of the airports will eventually have body scanners installed for the purpose of security purposes. You can currently opt out of the airport body scanner and have a pat-down, however this can change some time sooner or later since airports would prefer everybody to go through the full body scanner.

If you fly frequently then, based on the scientific research, you are going to be exposing yourself to X-rays which could cause you to sustain severe health problems.

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