AIRPORT X-RAY: EDUCATE BEFORE YOU RADIATE

by Dr. Tim O'Shea

Opting Out: The Facts About Airport X-ray Scanners

Can These Scanners Cause Cancer?

“Some studies reported significant genetic damage…”
- Boian Alexandrov, Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico
Although the forces generated from these scanners are small, resonant effects allow THz waves to unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as DNA replication.

Translation: It can destroy your DNA!
“…any X-ray photon may be the one which sets in motion the high-speed, high energy electron which causes a carcinogenic mutation. Such mutations rarely disappear. The higher their accumulated number in a population, the higher will be the population’s mortality rates from radiation-induced cancer and heart disease.”

- Dr. John Gofman, Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology, UC Berkeley
Gofman’s studies indicate that radiation from medical diagnostics and treatment is a causal factor in 50 percent of America’s cancers and 60 percent of heart disease.

Children – are more at risk because of their rapidly growing tissues. They are less able to repair X-ray damage to their DNA.

“The most likely risk from the airport scanners is a common type of skin cancer called basal cell carcinoma.”
- Dr. David Brenner, head of Columbia University’s Centre for Radiological Research
“If all 800 million people who use airports every year were screened with X-rays then the very small individual risk multiplied by the large number of screened people might imply a potential public health or societal risk. The population risk has the potential to be significant… If there are increases in cancers as a result of irradiation of children, they would most likely appear some decades in the future. It would be prudent not to scan the head and neck… There really is no other technology around where we’re planning to X-ray such an enormous number of individuals. It’s unprecedented in the radiation world.”

- Dr. David Brenner, head of Columbia University’s Centre for Radiological Research
 “…statistically someone is going to get skin cancer from these X-rays… No exposure to X-ray is considered beneficial. We know X-rays are hazardous but we have a situation at the airports where people are so eager to fly that they will risk their lives in this manner…”

- Dr Michael Love, Biophysics and Chemistry, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
“Collectively, the radiation doses from the scanners incrementally increase the risk of fatal cancers among the thousands or millions of travelers who will be exposed, some radiation experts believe… We don’t have enough information to make a decision on whether there’s going to be a biological effect or not.”

- Douglas Boreham, professor in medical physics and applied radiation sciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario
“The thing that worries me the most, is not what happens if the machine works as advertised, but what happens if it doesn’t.”

- Peter Rez, Arizona State University
“[We] cannot exclude the possibility of a fatal cancer attributable to radiation in a very large population of people exposed to very low doses of radiation.”

- National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, http://www.ncrponline.org/
(http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/03/briefing/3987b1_pres-report.pdf)
So what can you do to avoid the ionizing radiation? Opt out. Then security will just use the wand detector.

At the very least, listen to 5 minutes of common sense on the matter.