Commie Socialist death-panel-loving Europe has gone and banned TSA-style backscatter x-ray machines from its airports. The terrists are winning!
Issues of privacy and heavy-handed pat-downs in the case of refusal, there have been no independent studies of the safety of such scanners (and TSA agents who stand by the machines do not wear dosimeters to measure their own exposure) partly because the machines are outside the FDA’s jurisdiction – they’re for “security” not medicine. (The FDA has brushed off concern that the backscatter machines can cause cancer, based on dodgy data.
Europe has decided to ban the machines because of “safety concerns,” the pink cowards:
The European Commission, which enforces common policies of the EU’s 27 member countries, adopted the rule “in order not to risk jeopardizing citizens’ health and safety.”
As a ProPublica/PBS NewsHour investigation detailed earlier this month, X-ray body scanners use ionizing radiation, a form of energy that has been shown to damage DNA and cause cancer. Although the amount of radiation is extremely low, equivalent to the radiation a person would receive in a few minutes of flying, several research studies have concluded that a small number of cancer cases would result from scanning hundreds of millions of passengers a year.
European countries will be allowed to use an alternative body scanner, on that relies on radio frequency waves, which have not been linked to cancer. The TSA has also deployed hundreds of those machines – known as millimeter-wave scanners – in U.S. airports. But unlike Europe, it has decided to deploy both types of scanners.
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