Good News! TSA Scanners Damage DNA, Increase Cancer Risk to Everyone, But Will Kill Small Children and TSA Agents First

Via rdbrewer at Ace of Spades, the sort of story to warm your heart and corrupt your chromosomes:

These questions have not been answered to any satisfaction and the UCSF scientists, all esteemed in their fields and members of the National Academy of Sciences have been dismissed based on a couple of reports seemingly hastily put together by mid-level government technicians or engineers. The documents that I have reviewed thus far either have NO AUTHOR CREDITS or are NOT authored by anyone with either a Ph.D. or a M.D., raising serious concerns of the extent of the expertise of the individuals and organizations evaluating these machines with respect to biological safety. Yet, the FDA and TSA continue to dismiss some of the most talented scientists in the country...

With respect to errors in the safety reports and/or misleading information about them, the statement that one scan is equivalent to 2-3 minutes of your flight is VERY misleading. Most cosmic radiation is composed of high energy particles that passes right through our body and the plane itself without being absorbed. The spectrum that is dangerous is known as ionizing radiation and most of that is absorbed by the hull of the airplane. So relating non-absorbing cosmic radiation to tissue absorbing man-made radiation is simply misleading and wrong. Of course these are related and there is over-lap, but we have to compare apples to apples.

Furthermore, when making this comparison, the TSA and FDA are calculating that the dose is absorbed throughout the body. According the simulations performed by NIST, the relative absorption of the radiation is ~20-35-fold higher in the skin, breast, testes and thymus than the brain, or 7-12-fold higher than bone marrow. So a total body dose is misleading, because there is differential absorption in some tissues. Of particular concern is radiation exposure to the testes, which could result in infertility or birth defects, and breasts for women who might carry a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation. Even more alarming is that because the radiation energy is the same for all adults, children or infants, the relative absorbed dose is twice as high for small children and infants because they have a smaller body mass (both total and tissue specific) to distribute the dose. Alarmingly, the radiation dose to an infant's testes and skeleton is 60-fold higher than the absorbed dose to an adult brain!

Janet Napolitano's new toys (paid for with stimulus dollars, after lobbyists and politicians from both parties came to "agreements") seem to be quite dangerous at worst, and far from competently tested at best. I'd joked on Twitter about wearing a kilt if forced to fly and opting out, but I was merely making half-assed snark in a toothless protest of the tyrannical intrusion into personal liberties that the TSA represents for virtually no gain in safety from real airborne threats.

I'm now of the mind that until far more information is known about the effects of TSA scanners, that the only logical option for air travelers is to opt-out of these devices. This is even more vital for passengers with children and for those individuals that have a history of cancer in their families.

The scanners are no picnic for the TSA, either; they will absorb the amount of radiation that a human can "safely" absorb in a year in just 20 working days.

The TSA's scanners are a political safety device, not an air safety device. They do not address the most realistic threats to air travel, which are bombs or chemical incendiaries smuggled into cargo or luggage, or the threat of individual bombers hiding explosives in their body cavities. The purpose of the scanners is to make money for lobbyists and the companies they represent and to provide politicians and bureaucrats the political illusion that they are "doing something" to protect air travelers from terrorism. They persist in keeping up this illusion to avoid dealing with the abject fact that profiling, and profiling alone, is the most effective measure to prevent terrorist attacks on airliners.

The Obama Administration, Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security and the TSA are bending over backwards to treat all Americans like potential terrorists in order to avoid the uncomfortable truth that Muslim air travelers are by far the greatest, if not only threat to air security. They are more afraid of the ACLU and CAIR than al Qaeda, Hezbolla, or Hamas... and far more afraid to admit that political correctness is a not just a failure, but a weakness that devours resources in a time of scarcity.

Opt out now. Deal with the TSA's molesters, and pity the fact that their equipment is killing them for simply showing up. Fly no more than you have to.

Finally, throw the bums out in 2012 in favor of candidates from either party that are will to address the real threats we face from Muslim terrorism, and investigate the backroom deals that put these death machines in operation in the first place.

We will not surrender our liberties or our health to political correctness run amok.