It's true: Airport body scanners could give you cancer
(NaturalNews) The new, full-body security scanners being introduced at airports pose a greater skin cancer risk than governments have previously acknowledged and are especially dangerous to children and pregnant women, a new study has found.
The devices, known officially as backscatter X-ray machines, were introduced after the "Christmas Day Bomber" successfully got an explosive device through conventional airport screening. They use up to eight seconds of X-rays over the entire body to create a three-dimensional, full-body image of anything that passengers might be carrying beneath their clothing. More than a hundred of the scanners have already been rolled out at 32 U.S. airports, and they are being introduced in other countries, as well. The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) plans to have 450 of the scanners deployed by the end of 2010.
A new analysis of the radiation dose delivered by the machines, conducted by David Brenner and colleagues at Columbia University, found that because the beams concentrate X-rays on the body's skin, the effective dose may be 20 times higher than previously estimated...
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