U.S. Government Glossed Over Cancer Concerns As It Rolled Out Airport X-Ray Scanners
November 2nd, 2011Via: Pro Publica:
On Sept. 23, 1998, a panel of radiation safety experts gathered at a Hilton hotel in Maryland to evaluate a new device that could detect hidden weapons and contraband. The machine, known as the Secure 1000, beamed X-rays at people to see underneath their clothing.
One after another, the experts convened by the Food and Drug Administration raised questions about the machine because it violated a longstanding principle in radiation safety — that humans shouldn’t be X-rayed unless there is a medical benefit.
“I think this is really a slippery slope,” said Jill Lipoti, who was the director of New Jersey’s radiation protection program. The device was already deployed in prisons; what was next, she and others asked — courthouses, schools, airports? “I am concerned … with expanding this type of product for the traveling public,” said another panelist, Stanley Savic, the vice president for safety at a large electronics company. “I think that would take this thing to an entirely different level of public health risk.”
The machine’s inventor, Steven W. Smith, assured the panelists that it was highly unlikely that the device would see widespread use in the near future. At the time, only 20 machines were in operation in the entire country.
“The places I think you are not going to see these in the next five years is lower-security facilities, particularly power plants, embassies, courthouses, airports and governments,” Smith said. “I would be extremely surprised in the next five to 10 years if the Secure 1000 is sold to any of these.”
Today, the United States has begun marching millions of airline passengers through the X-ray body scanners, parting ways with countries in Europe and elsewhere that have concluded that such widespread use of even low-level radiation poses an unacceptable health risk.
The gullibility of the sheeple is mind-boggling. I have flown to Amerika several times a year ever since the X-ray scanners have been implemented, and not once has any other person joined me in opting out. I’m always the lone refusenik, holding up my line until one of the obese Thousands Standing Around goons stops gossiping and lumbers over to grope me. Every time I fly to the US, I bring along about 10 copies of this:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ucsf-jph-letter.pdf
and leave them on seats in various parts of the airport, in an attempt to educate someone … anyone. The last time I flew out of LAX, I was right behind a young family, with their grade school children, who were mindlessly heading toward the scanners in the line. I actually pulled out one of my copies and handed it to the mother, saying, “If you read this, you’ll see why it’s best NOT to subject your family to ionizing radiation.” She took the pages, glanced at the first page, and then handed it back to me, smiling, and saying, “No, thanks.” She didn’t even keep it to read it later. In the scanners they went. I wonder if she had read just this one sentence, whether she would have felt so completely comfortable about sending her approx. 6-year-old son into harm’s way:
“Because of the proximity of the testicles to skin, this tissue is at risk for
sperm mutagenesis.”