The latest complete-body scanners in use in 60 airports all over the country have become a reason for outrage n recent weeks. From the lawsuits that has been filed against the Transportation Security Administration because of the “intrusive” pat-down procedures, to passengers who get into scuffles with TSA agents. These new scanners are producing turmoil. Moreover, as the busiest travel days fast approach – with more than 1.6 million Americans expected to gather to airports over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend – there is no telling how some passengers would react.

The radiation exposure has been reported in units called millirem (mrem). The effective dosage in one scan of 0.01 mrem is 100 times less than the annual negligible single dose (NID) of 1 mrem which is recommended by the NCRP. This means that it would need at the minimum 100 scans of the same person in a year to each the amount which is taken as negligible.

According to Dr. David Brenner, the director of the center for radiological research at Columbia University in New York City, the bigger concern is the overall population risk. He said, “Even though the individual risk is very small, the impact on the population may not be small if the exposed population is large. This is potentially the case with airport X-ray scanners. We know the individual risk is very small, but multiply that by the number of people going through airport security each year in the U.S. – currently about 700 million, ma be one billion a decade from now – then we start to have a concern about the population risk.”