Amy Goodman: Forget Fear of Flying, Fear Airport Screening

[marmar]

from truthdig:



Forget Fear of Flying, Fear Airport Screening

Posted on Mar 28, 2012
By Amy Goodman


There was terror in the skies this week over Texas, caused not by a terrorist but by a pilot—a Flight Standards captain, no less. JetBlue Airways Capt. Clay Osbon, flying Flight 191 from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Las Vegas, began moving up and down the aisle after the jet was airborne, ranting, according to several passengers, about Iraq, Israel, al-Qaida and bombs, calling on passengers to recite the Lord’s Prayer, saying that they were “all going down.” An off-duty pilot in the cabin went to the cockpit to help the co-pilot with the emergency landing, while passengers and crew subdued Osbon. Osbon, who’d been with JetBlue almost since its founding, was taken to the hospital, suspended with pay, then criminally charged with interfering with a flight crew.

That’s enough to inspire a fear of flying in anyone. But just getting to your airplane these days may present a greater risk to your health than the actual flight.

New airport security screening technology, primarily backscatter X-ray devices, have come under increased scrutiny, as their effectiveness is questioned amid concerns that the radiation exposure may cause cancer. Adding to health concerns are both the graphic nature of the images captured, essentially nude photos of every person passing through the machine, and the aggressive—and for some, humiliating—nature of the alternative to the scans, the “enhanced pat-down” by a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins introduced a bill that would require independent laboratory testing of the X-ray backscatter machines, exactly what a group of University of California, San Francisco scientists called on the Obama administration to do in April 2010. Responding to the TSA claim (provided by the manufacturer, Rapiscan) that the radiation dose is less than “the dose one receives from eating one banana,” professor John Sedat and others wrote: “While the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high. ... There is good reason to believe that these scanners will increase the risk of cancer to children and other vulnerable populations [including pregnant women].” When this risk is multiplied over 700 million annual travelers, Michael Love, Ph.D., the manager of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine X-ray facility, told Discover magazine, “someone is going to get skin cancer.” The European Union has banned the machines. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/forget_fear_of_flying_fear_airport_screening_20120328/?ln

[xchrom]

1. Du rec. Nt

[tblue]

2. My dr will not go thru those scanners

because of the radiation. That's enough for me.