I know this is a little late, but being in the health field, as much as I don't want to be patted down, I don't feel like it is safe to be radiated.
The Interagency Committee on Radiation Safety issued an internal report to groups including the European Commission, International Atomic Energy Agency, Nuclear Energy Agency and the World Health Organization warning that pregnant women and children should never be exposed to the devices.
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.
Because the skin is one of the body's most radiation-sensitive organs, the scanners significantly increase the risk that passengers will develop basal cell carcinoma, a kind of skin cancer. Children and the 5 percent of adult passengers with certain relatively common gene mutations are at significantly higher risk due to their reduced ability to repair DNA damage. The thyroid also lies just under the skin in the neck putting it at risk too.
Here are some excerpts taken from a letter written by Drs John Sedat Ph.D., David Agard, Ph.D., Marc Shuman, M.D., Robert Stroud, Ph.D., all from the University of California.
Here is their background as described in the letter:
Dr. Sedat is a Professor Emeritus in Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, with expertise in imaging. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. The other cosigners include Dr Marc Shuman, and internationally well known and respected cancer expert and UCSF professor, as well as Drs David Agard and Robert Stroud, who are UCSF Professors, X-ray crystallographers, imaging experts and NAS members.
"We are writing to call your attention to serious concerns about the potential health risks of the recently adopted whole body backscatter X-ray airport security scanners. This is an urgent situation as these X-ray scanners are rapidly being implemented as a primary screening step for all air travel passengers."
"Our overriding concern is the extent to which the safety of this scanning device hasbeen adequately demonstrated. This can only be determined by a meeting of an impartial panel of experts that would include medical physicists and radiation biologists at which all of the available relevant data is reviewed."
"The physics of these X-rays is very telling: the X-rays are Compton-Scattering off outer molecule bonding electrons and thus inelastic (likely breaking bonds)."
(Translation: The ionizing radiation emitted by these devices can alter your DNA.)
"Unlike other scanners, these new devices operate at relatively low beam energies (28keV). The majority of their energy is delivered to the skin and the underlying tissue. Thus, while the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high."
"This comparison is very misleading: both the air travel cosmic ray exposure and chest X-rays have much higher X-ray energies and the health consequences are appropriately understood in terms of the whole body volume dose. In contrast, these new airport scanners are largely depositing their energy into the skin and immediately adjacent
tissue, and since this is such a small fraction of body weight / volume, possibly by one to two orders of magnitude, the real dose to the skin is now high."
"In addition, it appears that real independent safety data do not exist. A search,ultimately finding top FDA radiation physics staff, suggests that the relevant radiation quantity, the Flux [photons per unit area and time (because this is a scanning device)] has not been characterized. Instead an indirect test (Air Kerma) was made that emphasized the whole body exposure value, and thus it appears that the danger is low when compared to cosmic rays during airplane travel and a chest X-ray dose.
In summary, if the key data (flux-integrated photons per unit values) were available, it would be straightforward to accurately model the dose being deposited in the skin and adjacent tissues using available computer codes, which would resolve the potential concerns over radiation damage."
By the way, I hate the argument that goes a little like this..."we are already getting some radiation anyway, what's a little more". I hear this sort of argument all the time and not just about this topic. A little more of something that you are getting that is bad for you, is still bad for you.
Just my 2 cents.