[stevicus]

Thought this might be of interest to the forum.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/03/31...x.html?npt=NP1

Lichtenfeld says it doesn't necessarily give him great comfort that the TSA says the scans are safe.

"I can still remember getting my feet radiated as a child when I went to the shoe store and they had a machine which could see how my foot fit in the new shoes," he says. "We were told then that they were safe, and they were not."

(At first I thought Lichtenfeld was making this up, but you can actually see one of these foot scanners at the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices at the Science Museum of Minnesota.)

Another doctor who opts for the pat-down is Dr. Dong Kim, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' neurosurgeon.

"There is really no absolutely safe dose of radiation," says Kim, chair of the department of neurosurgery at the University of Texas Medical School. "Each exposure is additive, and there is no need to incur any extra radiation when there is an alternative."

This was echoed by several other physicians, including Dr. Andrew Weil.
"All radiation exposure adds to the cumulative total you've received over your lifetime," Weil wrote to me in an e-mail. "Cancer risks correlate with that number, so no dose of radiation is too small to matter."

The cumulative part is what strikes me as significant. I didn't really know this before. I thought if you had an x-ray or some minor exposure to radiation, it would go away after a while. They keep talking about "safe" levels of radiation regarding the nuclear power plants in Japan, but there are no "safe" levels of radiation.