Radiation levels from airport body scanners ‘safe’
08.04.11
The radiation from controversial airport full body scanners is negligible and poses no real threat to health, a report by US experts has said. Many US airports and some UK airports, including Heathrow and Manchester, have the security devices to help combat the threat of terror attacks.
The scanners use X-ray beams to produce images of the passenger 'naked', raising privacy concerns. As the rays are similar to those used in hospitals, some also have raised concerns about their safety. But California scientists writing in Archives of Internal Medicine calculate they contribute under 1% of radiation people are exposed to during a flight from the cosmic rays at high altitude.
Mr Patrick Mehta and Dr Rebecca Smith-Bindman, experts in public health and radiology at the University of California, say even the most frequent flyers who clock up 60 hours a week in the air will face only a minute increase in cancer risk. They say the scans might cause four extra cancers among a million of these frequent flyers, they say. In comparison, 600 cancers could occur in these travellers from the radiation received during the flight itself and 400,000 cancers would be expected to occur throughout their lifetime anyway, regardless of their travel exposure.
A spokesman for Manchester Airport said the findings should help reassure air passengers. He said: ‘We now have full body scanners at all three of our terminals for the 18.5m passengers that we have every year. The upside of the scanners is that they cut queuing - checks now take 30 seconds rather than over two minutes per person - and it means passengers do not have to be touched to be checked as part of the patting down process.'
‘Obviously if people hear the word X-ray they think radiation and they can start to worry, but the expert opinion we rely on - the Radiation Protection Board and the Health Protection Agency - confirms that the scans are safe. Acceptability levels among our passengers are extremely high. Since February 2010 when the scans became compulsory we have had only nine refusals. And only one of those was health-related.’
To book heathrow airport hotel or heathrow airport car park at the lowest price, click on these links to two great heathrow airport car parking and heathrow airport hotel price comparison page
