Just What I Need — More Radiation

Dur­ing my lunch break, I was lis­ten­ing to NPR (I had to make up for lis­ten­ing to the less-than socially accept­able talk show while dri­ving in to work this morn­ing) and heard a story that raised ques­tions about the safety of the new whole-body scan­ners being imple­mented in airports.

Accord­ing the NPR:

David Agard, a bio­chemist and bio­physi­cist at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, San Fran­cisco. “But there really is no thresh­old of low dose being OK. Any dose of X-rays pro­duces some poten­tial risk.”

Agard and sev­eral of his UCSF col­leagues recently wrote a let­ter to John Hol­dren the president’s sci­ence adviser, ask­ing for a more thor­ough look at the risks of expos­ing all those air­line pas­sen­gers to X-rays. The other sign­ers are John Sedat, a mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gist and the group’s leader; Marc Shu­man, a can­cer spe­cial­ist; and Robert Stroud, a bio­chemist and biophysicist.

“Ion­iz­ing radi­a­tion such as the X-rays used in these scan­ners have the poten­tial to induce chro­mo­some dam­age, and that can lead to can­cer,” Agard says.

The San Fran­cisco group thinks both the machine’s man­u­fac­turer, Rapis­can, and gov­ern­ment offi­cials have mis­cal­cu­lated the dose that the X-ray scan­ners deliver to the skin — where nearly all the radi­a­tion is concentrated.

The stated dose — about .02 microsiev­erts, a med­ical unit of radi­a­tion — is aver­aged over the whole body, mem­bers of the UCSF group said in inter­views. But they main­tain that if the dose is cal­cu­lated as what gets deposited in the skin, the num­ber would be higher, though how much higher is unclear. …

As a have pre­vi­ously writ­ten, I was treated for lym­phoma with radi­a­tion ther­apy almost thirty-five years ago. A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of my body received 40 siev­erts. That is 2,000 times what I would get each air­line trip. While that does not sound like much, I do have to won­der just what it will add on top of the dam­age that has already been done. But then the image of air­lin­ers fly­ing into build­ings is still very vivid. Such as hard trade off.

Where is high-speed rail? But then, the peo­ple that want to ruin our way of life would just bomb the trains. Guess I will just live with the risk of a lit­tle more radiation.

Is Still Here