Why not start atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs again. They had the same negligible 'theoretical' numbers claimed by the airport scanner salespeople.
This is absolutely and totally wrong. The risk factors have been revised a number of times since atmospheric testing stopped in the 1960's. Secondly, the dose from atmospheric testing was 4 or more orders of magnitude higher than that of these scanners.
Again you are sprouting the type of false argument that green groups use to scare people about something that is a trivial risk. Is your name David Noonan, Dave Sweeney or Helen Caldicott? This is exactly the same type of fear mongering that is used to support the implementation of these scanners in the first place. It is a false argument and it should be rejected in all cases.
One way at looking at the facts is money or resources being misdirected, causes death. The Airport security scheme is just like the Insulation debacle, only magnitudes worse.
Again the risks being debated were additional risks and additional deaths.
Don't try and compare it with a trip to the local shops, or in comparison to something else.
Actually, comparison with other risks are totally valid. The point is to get things into
perspective. Would you spend hours read about road deaths on the internet and then regurgitate it here. Or would you just get in your car and drive to the shops? Do you think twice about mowing the lawn or climbing a ladder to change a light bulb? Both driving and the home are the most risky places we live. But people don't think twice. But find something called radiation from a scan that is at least 10000 times less risky that driving or being in your home and then waste hours on it.
The fact is that everything we do in life has a risk. So this is not an additional risk it is a different risk. That is another point; you tell us of hundreds of people driving in order to avoid flying and being scanned, but there is a choice in that case. They can pick the small risk of flying and the scan or the large risk of driving. People who drive in that case are not dying because of the scan they are dying because of stupidity; because of making a poor choice on the risk because of fear mongering of exactly this type.
As for being magnitudes worse that the insulation scheme. How many people died from the insulation? I think it was about 5 at most, that's in a population of 20,000,000; and probably vastly less numbers of people who worked on or had insulation installed. Now the 16 in 1,000,000,000 that you claim from the scan would be 0.32 in 20,000,000. So if the entire population of australia was scanned then less would die than those who died from the "insulation debarcle"
The part about radiation is undeniable. Simple people buying this technology want to write off the risk as 'negligible' which is not the same a zero. Atmospheric testing of nuclear explosions was banned for the same 'negligible' reasons - it only added a few dozen or so deaths per test (shared worldwide). coughulative and compound exposure on elevated risk groups - has not AFAIK been written up.
Actually, it is totally deniable, there are many research groups in Australia alone looking at low dose radiation effects. There is plenty of evidence in that research to suggests a threshold applies at 100 mSv, that is 10,000,000 of the whole body scans. There are also populations around the world who live in a natural background radiation exposure of >20mSv and there cancer incident rates are the same as other populations that get much lower doses. In Australia the average background radiation dose is about 2.5 mSv per year. I'm sorry changing that to 2.5001 mSv is going to show nothing when people living in 20 mSv per year do not show any difference in effect.
As I said already atmospheric testing had much high doses than these scans.
Research on coughulative and compound exposure of high risk groups has been written up. There is the studies of the atomic bomb survivors or nuclear shipyard workers to name just 2. There are the studies that have been used to set the current theoretical risk factors. Basically, this is done by looking at the risk for these people who had doses of 500 mSv to 2000 mSv and seeing that is it a straight line. They then adopt something called the Linear No Threshold Hypothesis and extend that straight line to 0. This is only a hypothesis and is mainly used as a basis for setting regulatory limits. Generally only people interested in fear mongering, like ACF, Greenpeace, Helen Caldicott use these risk factors to calculate death rates at trivial radiation doses.
The part about driving is true - it is a hard research. Actions had a consequence and a body count - and that is not even tackling cost of injuries. Remove the cause, and you save that many lives. Also carbon emissions, hospital costs etc the list goes on. i think this is related to marginal cost and economics. You can draw a curve and say 'thats how many extra deaths'.
Of course it is true people pay me money to do this stuff. The numbers are not hard research at all. The Australia Bureau of Statistics provide the information for free and there are plenty of internet based resources.
The numbers game. I expect simple people to run counter arguments, but the fact is, these guys are security experts, they are on record, and their calculations are public. Politics, logic, hard numbers , and the need to create 'projects' where large payments are made to the preferred suppliers ride roughshod over the inconvenient truth.
Actually, you'll probably find that people who know about radiation effects will debunk the BS from security experts. Anyway, security experts don't know the first thing about radiation effects, something I've learnt in my day job in working to security requirements.
As for calculations, one simple calculation I did involved googling the deaths from terrorist airline attacks. There were hundreds of those over the last 40 or so years. If we got the entire population of the world to have one of these scans the deaths according to your number would still be less than 100. So if the scanners are effective at stopping terrorists attacks then the deaths will theoretically decrease. If we ignore the fact that theoretical deaths from these scans can never be measured compared to all the other things that kill people. You talk about saving lives, but that ignores the fact that everyone dies.
Next time you go through security, look to see how many employees wear radiation dosimeter tags, and why are they not sampling? They already know :evil: Its not saving the children either - children also get the same (unnecessary) dose.
There is an excellent reason for the lack of monitoring badges in australia. These devices are classified as cabinet x-ray devices. They are enclosed by shielding that prevents the radiation being emitted to employees. Also they do sampling to measure the radiation emissions from these machines, using other monitoring, employee dosimeter tags are not the only way to measure radiation and the other methods are actually superior to personal monitors.
Though one thing not mentioned is how many pax are picked out by the Israeli security personnel for further investigation and how many of those are innocent?The false positive rate needs to be known before concluding that their system really is superior.
We just need to look at the death of that brazilian guy on the tube in the UK. That was the isrealification of dealing with suicide bombers, shoot them in the head. Stops them from blowing themselves up, shame if there is no bomb in the first place.
