Full-body airport scans: expert confirms safety
5 March 2010
Fears that airport scanners may expose passengers to excessive radiation are misplaced and the security benefits outweigh any potential medical risks, a US expert says.
To reach dangerous levels of exposure a person would need to undergo between 2500 and 5000 scans in a year, which is “highly unlikely”, according to Associate Professor Mahadevappa Mahesh, chief physicist at Johns Hopkins University medical school in Baltimore.
“Current calculations indicated that backscatter systems are safe for general use, even in infants and children, pregnant women, and people with genetically-based hypersensitivity to radiation,” he said in a recent editorial in the British Medical Journal. He noted however that personal privacy issues still remained given the high detail of scans. (BMJ 2010; 340: c993)
(Backscatter systems use low-intensity X-rays that do not penetrate the body, but bounce off the skin.)
Last Reviewed: 05 March 2010
- 1. Mahesh M. Use of full body scanners at airports. BMJ 2010;340:c993. Extract available at: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/340/feb23_1/c993
