[ RadSafe ] scanners x-rays and media

[conrad i sherman]

Following This is the article in SF Weekly that has UCSF radiologists 
rebutting the letter that 4 UCSF scientists wrote to the White House.

"Calm down, people...
​Among the elements of paranoia and righteousness emanating from those 
opting out of TSA scans today, U.C. San Francisco radiology specialists 
say the fear of radiation should not be included. These are experts, 
folks, and their message is: You're not going to get cancer from these 
machines.

In fact, the radiation scientists told SF Weekly that the warnings about 
the scanners in a letter written by top U.C. San Francisco scientists 
earlier this year were plain "wrong," and written by people who "are 
totally unrelated to radiation," in the words of Professor Ronald 
Arenson. Robert Gould, a physicist in the UCSF radiology department and 
member of the Radiation Safety Committee in the university's Office of 
Research, contends that the amount of background radiation a person is 
exposed to in a normal day is the equivalent of 85 screenings in a TSA 
scanner.

The widely circulated April letter from four illustrious professors 
urged Dr. John Holdren, Assistant to President Obama for Science and 
Technology, to convene an impartial panel to evaluate the health risks 
involved with the scanners.


​The letter suggested that the scanners may concentrate an unhealthy 
amount of radiation to the skin, instead of spreading the rays out into 
the whole body like an X-ray. They said travelers over 65 and those with 
HIV were particularly at risk, and called for more evaluation of the 
effects on children and pregnant women. The letter also raised concern 
about radiation mutating men's sperm, since the testicles lay right 
under the skin. Ouch!

The FDA has since rebutted those claims and put out a letter of its own. 
Now the evidence is piling up that there's nothing to be worried about, 
say three professors in the radiology department at UCSF itself.

"The conclusions are wrong," Ronald Arenson, professor of radiology, 
tells SF Weekly of his own institution's letter. "People who are totally 
unrelated to radiation wrote it. ... It was senior faculty at UCSF. 
They're smart people and well-intended, but their conclusions, I think, 
were off-base. They don't understand how radiation translates to an 
actual dose in the human body."

It's been widely reported that the amount of radiation dealt to your 
body by the scanners is the equivalent of two minutes of flying time. 
Extrapolate that to your flight to Europe.

"The airport scanner thing is totally bogus," says Professor Fergus 
Coakley, chief of the abdominal imaging section at the UCSF radiology 
department. When you fly, you're "closer to the sun, there's less 
shielding from cosmic radiation, so being worried about the scan on the 
way to the plane ride where you're getting extra radiation is bogus."

Coakley says he's traveling this weekend to a radiology conference in 
Chicago, and he'll gladly take the scan. "I'd rather do that than the 
enhanced pat-down," he says with a laugh.

Arenson agrees. "I'll go through the scanner before getting patted down. 
Not that I care about being patted down, but it takes longer." "

I
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Conrad I. Sherman
Department of Nuclear Engineering
University of California
4163 Etcheverry Hall
Berkeley, California 94720-1730
csherman at nuc.berkeley.edu
Office: (510) 642-5015
Fax: (510) 643-9685
Mobile: (415) 336-7802