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Wednesday, November 2, 2011

TSA scanners: a cancer timebomb?

  We have extensively covered the safety of the TSA scanners in use at airports as far back as 2010. People line up like a Twilight Zone episode, passively standing in the scanners which emit radiation which is unmeasured and unchecked by any outside authority.
 Instead the TSA monitors its own machines and are unresponsive to scientists'  and the public concerns over radiation emissions; concern mounts for the agents operating the scanners and that the radiation that might be leaking undetected to the humans around and using the machines.
  Only the TSA, which has developed a reputation for arrogant autonomy, has the obligation to check its own scanners, which have been developed with regard to numerous scientists' concerns over their safety.
  How did we come to use these machines, why does no outside authority monitor them and why is the TSA increasing their use?
  A letter sent by four scientists from the University of California, San Francisco to the TSA expressing concern over a year ago can be seen here. Questions are raised about children, persons over 65, pregnant women and people with a proclivity for the disease.
  ProPublica has investigated the situation:
A ProPublica/PBS NewsHour investigation of how this decision was made shows that in post-9/11 America, security issues can trump even long-established medical conventions. The final call to deploy the X-ray machines was made not by the FDA, which regulates drugs and medical devices, but by the TSA, an agency whose primary mission is to prevent terrorist attacks. 
Research suggests that anywhere from six to 100 U.S. airline passengers each year could get cancer from the machines. Still, the TSA has repeatedly defined the scanners as “safe,” glossing over the accepted scientific view that even low doses of ionizing radiation — the kind beamed directly at the body by the X-ray scanners — increase the risk of cancer.
  Yet the TSA "glosses over" public health concerns, just as they pooh poohed privacy concerns; one official said blithely, “It’s a really, really small amount relative to the security benefit you’re going to get,” Kane said. 
  So that radiation is no big deal because only a few people will get cancer from it. Well, it's no big deal unless YOU'RE the one of the 6 to 100 people who gets cancer from going through them or YOU'RE the ones who are working next to the machines every day.
  In such an over regulated nation as ours, how did and do these machines continue to go unregulated without any outside monitoring?
  The answer is given below from the same ProPublica article:
Because of a regulatory Catch-22, the airport X-ray scanners have escaped the oversight required for X-ray machines used in doctors’ offices and hospitals. The reason is that the scanners do not have a medical purpose, so the FDA cannot subject them to the rigorous evaluation it applies to medical devices. 
Still, the FDA has limited authority to oversee some non-medical products and can set mandatory safety regulations. But the agency let the scanners fall under voluntary standards set by a nonprofit group heavily influenced by industry.
  This is why government should not be in charge of health care; this is why government watchdog agencies are necessary and encouraged. This is why the news media needs to take its proper role in monitoring events in the public interest.
  It is bewildering, in one sense, why the liberal left mocks Fox News as Faux News simply because they do not agree with the perspective Fox News takes, which is often countercultural to the MSM; yet it makes sense when one considers that the MSM in general swings primarily left. 
  Do we only want one point of view in this country, either right or left?
  Yet to cover up or simply choose to not cover these issues of public safety for months and even years belies the purpose of a media.
  For the media to not hound authorities over these issues is execrable; instead they write ad nauseam about Kim Kardashian and some woman's claim that Herman Cain made her feel uncomfortable.
  Cancer is a very real health threat, considering the numerous exposure human beings have in this country to various chemicals and food additives.
  The TSA needs to be hired out to a private company that would be subject to oversight.
  It seems the government is harder on private companies than they are on themselves.

1 comment:

  1. The millimeter-wave scanner has not been proven safe either. It reportedly can rip DNA and cause cell replication, which could theoretically include cancer cells already inside a body.
    It's not too late to support this bi-partisan action: http://www.senatenj.com/index.php/doherty/tsa-petition/sign-the-petition-help-stop-invasive-tsa-screening/7149
    Thank you.

    ReplyDelete