Airport body scanners are 'just as likely to kill you as terrorist bombs'

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

No worries: A US scientist has claimed that the risk of getting cancer from a single airport body scanner is about 1 in 30 million


The airport X-ray scanner has been touted as one of the best ways to prevent a future terrorist attack.

But now a leading scientist has come forward to say it is just as likely to kill you as a terrorist's bomb blowing your plane out of the sky.

The bizarre warning stems from a statistical coincidence which apparently shows that you are just as likely to die from radiation allegedly emitted by the scanners as you are to die due to a terrorist bob on your flight.

Peter Rez, from Arizona State University, 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, making body scanners redundant.

He said: '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, he said.

Rez has 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.

Rez 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.

But he added: '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.'

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.

A number of scientists have already written to to the Food and Drug Administration to complain that the safety aspects have not been properly addressed before the nationwide rollout of the scanners.


source: dailymail