According to the study, one would have to “undergo 50 airport body scans to equal the amount of radiation received from a single dental X-ray”
When the full body scanners hit the airports, I hit the roof. Having spats on my Facebook page with those who support stronger security and those who find this an invasion of our privacy.
I was taking on both vigorously, but for me, aside from just one more thing to make me feel depressed about the state of our world, I was mostly upset about the continuing exposure of seemingly small, innocuous things in our daily lives and the cumulative effect they have on us, but in particular, on my husband Dave.
Did you know for instance that in our daily exposure to things like radiation, when you fly from one coast to the other on a flight you accumulate enough radiation to equal a chest x-ray?
When this study was published yesterday to tell us how safe these machines are, and not address the political or personal invasiveness, I wanted to just SCREAM. Again, the studies are done on this single item. And it may be true (I’m not a big conspiracy person). BUT, no one has done a study on what all of “these things” in our daily lives do to us cumulatively.
I’ve talked about this in other posts when looking at diet and ways to minimize our loved one’s exposure to pesticides, prepared food preservatives, etc. All the studies show that any one of these things has minimal exposure and we need not worry. But where oh where is the study that shows the cumulative effect of all of these small things, day after day after day?
For someone who is immune suppressed it becomes even more of an issue. At least from my perspective.
On top of that, on the political side, they Homeland Security department aggressively and punitively made the pat down option as gross and invasive as possible to deter passengers from exempting themselves from the scanners. This was incredibly outrageous to me and I think a huge blunder by this current administration. There are people like my husband, and others even worse, who do travel and can’t or shouldn’t go through any scanners. Our country treats the disabled better than almost any country in the world, and in this instance they have been ill prepared, grossly unkind, and I don’t like it.
Dave doesn’t seem to care, he just goes through the scanner and then gets grilled about his port in his clavicle. He gives me hugs and tells me to calm down. ARGH! I don’t want to calm down. Somewhere we need to take a stand. Not too mention that many of us believe that they, in fact, do not make us safer.
Long story short, I got another article in Technorati published on this for us cancer folks. I wonder if they are getting sick of me yet over there!
Article first published as Full-Body Scans Pose Little Risk – To Who? on Technorati.
And hopefully I will get back to my feel good posts. I like them better. I have had a bit of a riled up week for some reason! I can most definitely get on my soap box from time to time. Stay strong, be well, live your life, hug your friends and family, enjoy the sunshine!
