To prevent terrorist attacks, about 250 X-ray scanners already are installed in U.S. airports, along with 264 body scanners that use another technology, low-energy radio waves known as millimeter waves.
As an investigation by the news organization ProPublica and PBS NewsHour points out, research shows that the scanners relying on X-rays will cause six to 100 U.S. airline passengers every year to get cancer. The millimeter wave scanners, on the other hand, have not been shown to cause cancer.
So why is the U.S. bucking the pattern of most of the developed world and installing more and more “backscatter” X-ray scanners?
The ProPublica/PBS NewsHour investigation, an in-depth examination of how X-ray scanners became established as an airport security tool, found that it is a case of allowing security concerns to trump health issues. The final call to deploy the X-ray machines was made not by the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medical devices, but by the Transportation Security Administration, which focuses on preventing terrorism.
The FDA has some authority to oversee non-medical products, but the agency let the scanners fall under voluntary standards set by a nonprofit group heavily influenced by industry. The TSA, for its part, relied on a small body of unpublished research to insist the machines were safe, and ignored contrary opinions from U.S. and European authorities that recommended precautions, especially for pregnant women.
Both the FDA and TSA say assure the scanners’ safety. But none of the main studies cited by the TSA, the investigation found, has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, the gold standard for scientific research.
Robin Kane, the TSA’s assistant administrator for security technology, said it is important to use both scanner technologies to create industry technology competition that will hold down costs and “keep everyone trying to get the better mousetrap.”
He said the radiation from the backscatter machines is “a really, really small amount relative to the security benefit you’re going to get.”
The backscatter scanner being installed at airports is made by Rapiscan Systems, which won big contracts after unleashing an intense and sophisticated lobbying campaign.
Passengers screened by its Secure 1000 system stand between two large blue boxes and are scanned with a pencil X-ray beam that rapidly moves left to right and up and down the body.
The millimeter waves machine used at airports, ProVision, is made by defense contractor L-3 Communications. Passengers using it enter a chamber that looks like a round phone booth.
The TSA plans to have one or the other operating at nearly every security lane in America by 2014. Officers will direct every passenger, including children, to go through either a metal detector or a body scanner, and the passenger’s only alternative will be to request a physical pat-down.
STUART SILVERSTEIN
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