WHO Research Concludes Cell Phones Cause Brain Tumors

March 16, 2010

Natural News

By David Guttierrez

A large multinational research effort overseen by the World Health Organization has concluded that heavy mobile phone use significantly increases the risk of brain and salivary gland tumors.

The Interphone studies surveyed 12,800 people in 13 countries between 2000 and 2004. Although the final findings have not yet been released, they have been accepted for publication in a scientific journal and will see print before the end of 2009.

The conclusions are particularly surprising given that the industry-funded effort has been widely criticized for designing its studies to minimize the apparent risks of cell phone use.

The studies examined the relationship between cell phone use and the risk of three different types of brain tumor and one tumor of the salivary gland. They concluded that “use of mobile phones for a period of 10 years or more” was associated with a “significantly increased risk” of the tumors.

Six of eight studies found up to a 39 percent increase in the risk of glioma, the most common type of brain tumor. Gliomas can be either benign or malignant. The risk of acoustic neurinoma, a benign tumor of the nerve between the brain and the ear, was found to increase up to 3.9 times in two of seven studies, but problems with participants’ memories interfered with these findings. Another study found a 50 percent increase in the risk of salivary gland tumors.

Some researchers have suggested that the Interphone study probably understates the risks of cell phone use, due to flaws in its methodology. The study has been criticized for including people who made as little as one call per week yet excluding children and young adults (considered the most at-risk population), non-cellular cordless phones (which also emit radiation), several kinds of tumors, and participants who either died before the study concluded or became too sick to answer questions.

Some of the Interphone studies found that short-term cell phone use decreased the risk of cancer, further suggesting research flaws.

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Study Shows Americans are Being Overtreated

March 15, 2010

Associated Press

By Lindsey Tanner

CHICAGO — Too much cancer screening, too many heart tests, too many cesarean sections. A spate of recent reports suggests that many Americans are being overtreated. Maybe even President Barack Obama, champion of an overhaul and cost-cutting of the health care system.

Is it doctors practicing defensive medicine? Or are patients so accustomed to a culture of medical technology that they insist on extensive tests and treatments?

A combination of both is at work, but new evidence and updated guidelines are recommending a step back and more thorough doctor-patient talks about risks and benefits of screening tests.

Americans, including the commander in chief, need to realize that “more care is not necessarily better care,” wrote cardiologist Dr. Rita Redberg, editor of Archives of Internal Medicine. She was commenting on Obama’s recent physical.

His exam included prostate cancer screening and a virtual colonoscopy. The PSA test for prostate cancer is not routinely recommended for any age and colon screening is not routinely recommended for patients younger than 50. Obama is 48. A White House spokesman noted that earlier colon cancer screening is sometimes recommended for high-risk groups, such as African-Americans.

Doctors disagree on whether a virtual colonoscopy is the best method. But it’s less invasive than the traditional procedure and doesn’t require sedation — or the possible temporary transfer of presidential power, the White House said.

Yet Redberg, a doctor with expertise in health policy, takes issue with that test and a heart scan to look for calcium deposits in the president’s arteries. She said the calcium check isn’t recommended for low-risk men like Obama.

And the colon exam exposed him to radiation “while likely providing no benefit to his care,” she wrote in an editorial in the medical journal. Obama’s experience “is multiplied many times over” at a huge financial cost to society, and to patients exposed to potential harms but no benefits.

“People have come to equate tests with good care and prevention,” said Redberg, of the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center. “Prevention is all the things your mother told you — eat right, exercise, get enough sleep, don’t smoke — and we’ve made it into getting a new test.”

This week alone, a New England Journal of Medicine study suggested that too many patients are getting angiograms — invasive imaging tests for heart disease — who don’t really need them; and specialists convened by the National Institutes of Health said doctors are too often demanding repeat cesarean deliveries for pregnant women after a first C-section.

Last week, the American Cancer Society cast more doubt on routine PSA tests for prostate cancer. And a few months ago, other groups recommended against routine mammograms for women in their 40s, and for fewer Pap tests looking for cervical cancer.

Experts dispute how much routine cancer screening saves lives. It also sometimes detects cancers that are too slow-growing to cause harm, or has false-positive results leading to invasive but needless procedures — and some risks. Treatment for prostate cancer that may be too slow-growing to be life-threatening can mean incontinence and impotence. Angiograms carry a slight risk for stroke or heart attack.

Not all doctors and advocacy groups agree with the criticism of screening. Many argue that it can improve survival chances and that saving even a few lives is worth the cost of routinely testing tens of thousands of people.

Dr. Peter Pronovost, a Johns Hopkins University patient safety expert, said routine testing is often based on bad science, or on guidelines that quickly become outdated as new science emerges.

The recent shift in focus reflects evolving research on the benefits and risks of screening.

While some patients clearly do benefit from screening, others clearly do not, said Dr. Richard Wender, former president of the American Cancer Society.

These include very old patients, who may unrealistically fear cancer and demand a screening test, when their risks are far higher of dying from something else, Wender said.

“Sometimes it’s kind of the path of least resistance just to order the test,” he said.

Doctors also often order tests or procedures to protect themselves against lawsuits — so-called defensive medicine — and also because the fee-for-service system compensates them for it, said Dr. Gilbert Welch, a Dartmouth University internist and health outcomes researcher.

Some doctors think “it’s always a good thing to look for things to be wrong,” Welch said. It also has become much easier to order tests — with the click of a mouse instead of filling out forms, and both can lead to overuse, he said.

While many patients also demand routine tests, they’re often bolstered by advertisements, medical information online — and by doctors, too, Welch said.

“To some extent we’ve taught them to demand these things,” he said. “We’ve systematically exaggerated the benefits of early diagnosis,” which doesn’t always improve survival. “We don’t always tell people there might actually be downsides” to testing.

Jennifer Traig, an Ann Arbor, Mich., author of a book about hypochondria, says patients like her often think, “I’m getting better care if we’re checking for more things.”

Traig has had many costly high-tech tests, including an MRI and several heart-imaging tests, for symptoms that turned out to be nothing. She thinks doctors were right to order those tests, but that counseling could have prevented her from “wasting resources” and getting tests it turned out she didn’t need.

The new guidance from the cancer society last week on PSA testing, echoing others’ advice on mammograms, is for doctors and patients to thoroughly discuss testing, including a patient’s individual disease risks, general pros and cons of testing and possible harms it may cause.

Dr. Bruce Minsky, a University of Chicago cancer specialist who still favors routine mammograms for women in their 40s, said that emphasis is a positive trend.

“That to me is one of the greatest benefits,” he said. “It enhances that communication between the physician and patient.”

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Future Disasters Include Solar Storms

March 1, 2010

NPR

By Jon Hamilton

A massive solar storm could leave millions of people around the world without electricity, running water, or phone service, government officials say.

That was their conclusion after participating in a tabletop exercise that looked at what might happen today if the Earth were struck by a solar storm as intense as the huge storms that occurred in 1921 and 1859.

Solar storms happen when an eruption or explosion on the surface of the sun sends radiation or electrically charged particles toward Earth. Minor storms are common and can light up the Earth’s Northern skies and interfere with radio signals.

Every few decades, though, the sun experiences a particularly large storm. These can release as much energy as 1 billion hydrogen bombs.

How Well Can We Weather The Solar Storm?

The exercise, held in Boulder, Colorado, was intended to investigate “what we think could be close to a worst-case scenario,” says Tom Bogdan, who directs the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder. The Center is a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“It’s important to understand that, along with other types of natural hazards, (solar) storms can cause impacts,” says Craig Fugate, Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), who also took part in the tabletop exercise.

Bogdan and Fugate say that eventually there will be another storm as big as the ones in 1921 and 1859 — a sort of solar Katrina.

But the impact is likely to be far worse than in previous solar storms because of our growing dependence on satellites and other electronic devices that are vulnerable to electromagnetic radiation.

In the tabletop exercise, the first sign of trouble came when radiation began disrupting radio signals and GPS devices, Bogdan says.

Ten or 20 minutes later electrically charged particles “basically took out” most of the commercial satellites that transmit telephone conversations, TV shows and huge amounts of data we depend on in our daily lives, Bogdan says.

“When you go into a gas station and put your credit card in and get some gas,” he says, “that’s a satellite transaction.”

Disabled Satellites Are Just The Beginning

The worst damage came nearly a day later, when the solar storm began to induce electrical currents in high voltage power lines. The currents were strong enough to destroy transformers around the globe,” Bogdan says, leaving millions of people in northern latitudes without power.

Without electricity, many people also lost running water, heat, air conditioning and phone service. And places like hospitals had to rely on emergency generators with fuel for only two or three days, Bogdan says.

In many ways, the impact of a major solar storm resembles that of a hurricane or an earthquake, says Fugate.

But a solar Katrina would cause damage in a much larger area than any natural disaster, Fugate says. For example, power could be knocked out almost simultaneously in countries from Sweden to Canada and the U.S., he says. So a lot more people in a lot more places would need help.

Individuals don’t need to make any special preparation for a solar storm, Fugate says. The standard emergency kit of water and food and first aid supplies will work just fine.

“If you’ve got your family disaster plan together, you’ve taken the steps, whether it be a space storm, whether it be a system failure, whether it be another natural hazard that knocks the power out,” Fugate says.

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Science Mimicking Photosynthesis in Artificial Leaves

March 1, 2010

Natural News

By David Gutierrez

Researchers from Imperial College London have launched a £1 million ($1.6 million) study to create what they call an “artificial leaf,” mimicking the process of photosynthesis that allows plants to generate energy from the sun.

Plants use solar radiation to power a chemical reaction that converts water and carbon dioxide into sugar. Part of this reaction entails splitting water molecules into their component hydrogen and oxygen parts, something that remains very expensive using modern technology.

Photosynthesis is so efficient, however, that scientists estimate that it could meet all the Earth’s power needs for a year from merely an hour of sunlight. An artificial photosynthesis system that used only 10 percent of the light hitting it could meet all global energy needs if it covered only 0.16 percent of the Earth’s surface area (about 315,000 square miles).

“We know that plants have already evolved to do it and we know that, fundamentally, it’s a workable process on a large scale,” said John Loughhead of the UK Energy Research Center. “Ultimately, the only sustainable form of energy we’ve got is the sun. From a strategic viewpoint, you have to think this looks really interesting because we know we’re starting from a base of feasibility.”

In contrast to other alternative energy sources such as solar panels or windmills, which produce electricity directly, the Imperial College researchers want to use photosynthesis to produce fuels — either hydrogen for fuel cells, or sugars for biofuel engines. Even though the burning of these fuels would still produce carbon dioxide, the researchers believe it would be balanced out by the carbon dioxide that the artificial leaf removed from the air to make the fuel in the first place.

As one of their first steps, researchers are working on an artificial copy of the enzyme, photosystem 2, that plants use to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

“It doesn’t mean that you try to build exactly what the leaf has,” researcher James Barber said. “Leonardo da Vinci tried to design flying machines with feathers that flapped up and down. But in the end we built 747s and Airbus 380s, completely different to a bird.”

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More Over-Radiated Cancer Patients

February 26, 2010

The New York Times

By Walt Bogdanich and Rebecca R. Ruiz

A hospital in Missouri said Wednesday that it had overradiated 76 patients, the vast majority with brain cancer, during a five-year period because powerful new radiation equipment had been set up incorrectly even with a representative of the manufacturer watching as it was done.

The hospital, CoxHealth in Springfield, said half of all patients undergoing a particular type of treatment — stereotactic radiation therapy — were overdosed by about 50 percent after an unidentified medical physicist at the hospital miscalibrated the new equipment and routine checks over the next five years failed to catch the error.

The revelation comes at a time of growing concern about safety procedures for a new generation of powerful, computer-controlled medical radiation equipment.

Stereotactic therapy delivers radiation in such high doses that usually only one treatment is required. It is commonly used to treat small tumors in the head, which must be firmly stabilized, allowing radiation to be delivered to a precise location.

The error was discovered in September 2009 only after a second physicist received training on the equipment, made by BrainLAB, and the hospital began questioning whether the machine had been installed correctly in 2004, in a process called commissioning.

The overdoses at CoxHealth occurred in a state where there is little or no government oversight of radiation therapy, a fact that Robert H. Bezanson, the hospital’s president and chief executive, chose to emphasize.

On Wednesday, he released a letter that he wrote to the Food and Drug Administration, saying that its recent decision to toughen oversight of diagnostic radiation did not go far enough.

“The initiative should be broadened to include regulation of medical radiation therapy as well,” he wrote. “We have also learned that the incident here at CoxHealth is, unfortunately, not an isolated occurrence. Rather, similar instances of medical overradiation have occurred at other hospitals throughout the country. Without increased regulation and oversight, these instances of medical overradiation will likely continue.”

The hospital promised to work with state legislators on ways to better regulate radiation therapy.

Last month, The New York Times documented the harm that can result from radiation errors when basic safety rules are not followed. It also found that in a variety of ways, the pace of technology had outpaced the ability of the medical profession and regulators to keep up.

The overdoses in Springfield echoed what occurred at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., where a similar commissioning error resulted in 77 brain cancer patients’ receiving 50 percent more radiation than prescribed in 2004 and 2005. The failure of medical facilities to properly commission new radiological equipment was cited as a concern last November by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.

A testing service for institutions participating in National Cancer Institute trials recommends that certain newly installed radiotherapy equipment undergo an external, independent review before patients are treated. That did not occur at either Moffitt or CoxHealth.

CoxHealth said that so far it had not found any patients who had been harmed beyond the complications of routine radiation therapy. But patients are still being contacted. Some patients, who were seriously ill, have died, and the hospital is looking into those cases.

“The review of their charts and situation is still ongoing,” said Dr. John Duff, senior vice president for hospital operations. “It would be premature to speculate whether the overexposure was a contributing factor to their death.”

Dr. Duff said he did not know why the BrainLAB employee who was present while the new equipment was being installed had not caught the mistake. He said that the hospital did not have any reports from BrainLAB indicating a problem.

The physicist who incorrectly installed the equipment no longer works at the hospital. Officials there declined to explain the circumstances of his departure.

“It’s unacceptable to us that an error like this occurred, and we are taking steps to make sure that an error like this doesn’t happen again,” Mr. Bezanson said.

The hospital said its stereotactic system “remains suspended indefinitely while we are auditing the entire program.”

Kate Franco, a spokeswoman for BrainLAB, issued a statement Wednesday that said the company had assisted CoxHealth in figuring out what went wrong. “Reviews determined that BrainLAB equipment performed as designed and did not malfunction,” the statement said.

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Many Cancer Patients Over Radiated

February 26, 2010

Natural News

By Mike Adams

One of the advantages of natural medicine is that if you make a mistake on your dosage, it’s usually no big deal because natural medicine is inherently safe. But conventional medicine, with all its toxic chemotherapy poisons and irradiation machines, can be fatal even when simple mistakes are made. Numerous patients have already been killed by miscalibrated chemotherapy pumps that drip poison in to the bodies of patients. And now there’s news from Springfield Missouri where an actively-used brain cancer irradiation machine has been miscalibrated since 2004.

Oops. Gee, didn’t anyone wonder why the burn marks were so severe and patients were losing brain function so rapidly?

Oh, wait. I forgot: Nobody noticed because losing cognitive function is a “normal” side effect of conventional cancer treatments. Harming patients in the cancer industry is now so routine that nobody even notices it anymore!

Nobody bothered to check the machine
The facts of this case are a bit frightening because this could happen anywhere, in any hospital: For the last five years, patients undergoing brain irradiation treatments have been over-exposed to very high levels of radiation. The radiation machine at the CoxHealth hospital in Springfield, Missouri was apparently never calibrated correctly. The incompetent technicians who set up the machine (who probably lost their own brain function as a result of being around so many miscalibrated radiation machines) apparently never bothered to configure it correctly. They just used the default setting the machine came with, which happened to be the “Fry my brain” setting.

Now here’s the really scary part: The massive radiation overdose problem was only discovered when the hospital trained a new physician on the machine. They were apparently going over all the settings and functions of the machine when the new doctor asked something like, “Hey, why is this dosage knob turned all the way up to ‘Hiroshima’?”

Hospital administrators scratched their heads (after which clumps of hair fell out) and then began to realize something was wrong. “This might explain all the severe radiation burns on patients skulls…”

Oops.

So what, exactly, do you do in a case like this? Do you call all the brain cancer patients who suffered radiation burns and a loss of cognitive function and say, “Um, we’re really sorry that we fried your brain because we were too stupid to configure the radiation machine correctly…”

Or do you just hope no one notices because cancer patients are too frightened to know the difference between “treatment” and a radiological assault?

I have a solution to this problem
This accidental irradiation overdose issue is a huge problem all across the country. Radiation machines are often miscalibrated, and there’s virtually no oversight by anyone. Hospitals can openly operate miscalibrated machines for years on end without anyone doing a single thing to stop them.

But I have a simple, highly-effective solution to this problem: Just require cancer doctors to irradiate their own brains using the machines before treating patients. If such a rule were enforced, I’ll bet you that all of a sudden those machines would be correctly calibrated.

Naturopathic physicians, by the way, aren’t afraid to take the same medicine they’re about to prescribe to patients. You need these anti-viral herbs? I’ll take some too just to show you how safe they are, see? No big deal.

But conventional cancer doctors would never inject themselves with chemotherapy or stick their heads under an operating radiotherapy machine. You know why? Because those treatments are dangerous! That’s why they’re reserved solely for patients. Only the patients get poisoned and irradiated.

Why do you think radiology technicians flee the room before they fire up their machines on patients? They flee the room because they don’t want to be anywhere near that radiation!

Cancer doctors aren’t very bright about curing cancer, but they are smart enough to figure out that radiation = cancer. Which makes it all the more hilarious that they use radiation to treat cancer, huh?

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Steps Taken to Track Radiation Exposure

Febuary 17, 2010

Natural News

By S. L. Baker

Many Americans are exposed to atomic bomb levels of radiation (http://www.naturalnews.com/025767_R…) over their lifetimes, thanks to the medical industry’s determination to push radiation imaging techniques like mammography and CT scans on the healthy as well as the ill. In fact, over the past three decades, Americans’ exposure to radiation through common medical tests has soared six-fold. But although it is a well-known scientific fact that radiation exposure, which is cumulative, increases the risk of cancer, government scientists have failed to warn the public about the dangers of repeated tests involving radiation, claiming the specific risk level is unknown.

Now, finally, researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center have decided radiation dose exposure reports should be included in patients’ electronic medical records. According to an article in the February issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology (JACR), the NIH researchers hope this effort will result in an eventual accurate assessment of cancer associated with low-dose radiation exposure from medical imaging tests.

“The cancer risk from low-dose medical radiation tests is largely unknown. Yet it is clear that the U.S. population is increasingly being exposed to more diagnostic-test-derived ionizing radiation than in the past,” David A. Bluemke, MD, lead author of the article and director of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at the NIH Clinical Center, said in a statement to the press. “One widely publicized appraisal of medical radiation exposure suggested that about 1.5 to 2 percent of all cancers in the USA might be caused by the clinical use of CT alone.”
A new radiation reporting policy
To attempt to document the amount of radiation exposure patients receive from medical tests, the radiology and nuclear medicine experts at the NIH Clinical Center have come up with a radiation reporting policy that involves the major radiation equipment vendors, starting with keeping track of exposures from CT and PET/CT scans. “All vendors who sell imaging equipment to Radiology and Imaging Sciences at the NIH Clinical Center will be required to provide a routine means for radiation dose exposure to be recorded in the electronic medical record. This requirement will allow cataloging of radiation exposures from these medical tests,” said Dr. Bluemke. In addition, the NIH will now require that vendors make sure that radiation exposure can be tracked by patients in their own personal health records.

Dr. Bluemke added that this approach is consistent with the American College of Radiology’s and Radiological Society of North America’s official stance that “patients should keep a record of their X-ray history”. You read that correctly. Patients themselves are currently supposed to keep up with how much radiation they’ve been bombarded with, according to the radiology industry.

What’s more, the NIH’s new pronouncement that requires radiation testing vendors to keep track of how much radiation they expose patients to only applies to people receiving screening or testing through the NIH. “We encourage all medical imaging facilities to include similar requirements for radiation-dose-reporting outputs from the manufacturers of radiation-producing medical equipment,” Dr. Bluemke said.

So the new NIH policy does not mean other medical centers and hospitals that use medical imaging are now required to keep records of how much radiation they are zapping patients with — the government is only encouraging these facilities to follow through on this recommendation. Bottom line: the only real protection from excessive medical radiation is for people to take control of their own health, to ask questions of any doctor who wants to order these tests, and to avoid any and all unnecessary radiation imaging testing.

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Breast Cancer Fears Grow Around Household Cleaners

February 15, 2010

Daily Finance

By Alex Selkever

That fresh clean smell that American’s love may be boosting cases of breast cancer in the U.S.– and possibly even causing breast cancer in young children, let alone their moms.

Doctors and environmental scientists are growing more concerned that chemicals found in many household cleaning supplies, such as floor cleaners and glass cleaners, are behind the ongoing increase in breast cancer cases in the U.S. According to The New York Times, the chances that a 50 year-old white woman will develop breast cancer has increased from 1% in 1975 to 12% today. Anecdotal evidence from some of the latest epidemiological data suggests that younger women (and a growing number of men) are contracting the cancer.

Environmental Factors Outweigh Genetics, Health

Some of this increase likely results from better detection. But many of these problems appear to stem from a person’s surroundings rather than their genetics or health. For example, researchers have found that Asian women living in the U.S. have much higher rates of breast cancer than Asian women living in Asia. This implies that the problem is something environmental.

“It is highly likely that environmental toxins in air, food, dust, soil and drinking water have contributed to increasing rates of cancer in Americans of all ages, including our children,” reported Dr. Philip Landrigan, Director of the Center for Children’s Health and the Environment at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in testimony before Congress. “The known and suspected causes of childhood cancer include benzene, other solvents, radiation, arsenic, parental smoking, certain pesticides and certain chemicals in the environment that have the potential to disrupt the function of the endocrine system.”

Household Items May Be at Fault

Other chemicals that scientists suspect of playing a role in the rise of these illnesses include simple bleach, flame retardants (many of which have been banned in Europe) and components of plastics used in packaging for food, canned goods, and, until recently, children’s bottles and sippy cups. The American public may already be sensing the danger as sales of green cleaning products are skyrocketing. Industry, too, is changing its tune. Both Clorox and cleaning products company S.C. Johnson have begun to reveal ingredients lists for their products, although its still hard to ascertain the true impact of the chemicals they list due to the multiple forms these chemicals could take.

The new disclosure policies are clearly due in part to impending green labeling initiatives by retailing giant Wal-Mart (WMT) and to aggressive rating and disclosure policies by GoodGuide, an online product rating site that focuses on environmental and health impacts of household cleaners, cosmetics and health products. Cleaning products company Clorox (CLX) rolled out a green line of cleaners and the entire segment of green cleaning is growing at triple-digit rates, according to product research firm MinTel.

But many of the substances that health care experts are worried about tend to persist in the environment for many years. So even as Americans switch to a greener cleaning regime, the trends in health problems that may be resulting from these more toxic substances may not slow or reverse for decades. In other words, even if Americans can learn to ditch the happy smells, they are hardly ouf of the woods on breast cancer or other potentially deadly ailments.

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Body Scanners Pose Privacy and Health Risks

February 12, 2010

ZD Net

By AAP

Following in the footsteps of the US, the UK, The Netherlands and Canada, the Federal Government has announced that it will spend $28 million on full body scanners to be introduced at eight Australian airports next year.

The scanners, which look through a passenger’s clothes and create a three-dimensional image of their body to detect any concealed weapons or explosives, will be placed at screening points servicing international travellers.

Not only have there been there concerns that airport security staff will view naked images of people, including children, there has also been the matter of images being posted on the internet either by computer hackers or security staff.

There have also been concerns about health risks posed by the machines, particularly for frequent fliers or pregnant women, and the head of the Czech nuclear watchdog has stated that scanners that use X-rays (not all scanners do) are “too risky” because the exposure to radiation could cause cancer.

Chair of the NSW council for civil liberties Cameron Murphy, said he signed a letter with other civil liberties groups calling on federal infrastructure and transport minister Anthony Albanese to engage in meaningful debate before rolling out the scanners — to which he received no reply.

“The problem with this is that it goes too far and it goes too far by posing a health risk and a privacy risk and there simply isn’t the commensurate gain in security to warrant this,” he said.

“It’s clearly not worth the immense risk to people’s privacy and health, potential to risk their health, and clearly these systems don’t work.”

Civil rights had deteriorated in Australia since the terrorist attacks in New York on 11 September 2001, Murphy said.

He added there was a potential danger, particularly to frequent travellers, that “being radiated every day” could pose a health or fertility risk.

“Extra measures are taken when someone has an X-ray … the doctor exits the room. We don’t know what risk this poses … we’re dealing with radiation here.”

Murphy said the scanners invade people’s privacy by producing a “crystal clear naked image”.

“The minister talks about it being a stick figure, well I’ve seen three different scanners that are used overseas, presumably one of those will be selected in Australia and the scanners showed a crystal clear image, software then airbrushes it, a modesty measure,” said Murphy, adding the scans he witnessed took six minutes, potentially causing lengthy airport delays.

“The problem of course is that the image is stored in a hard drive, it’s possible for it to be transferred to other places. It’s already happening in the UK and there’s no reason why it couldn’t happen here.

“People of all ages use airports, do you really want some security guard looking at an image of your naked 13-year-old daughter? I mean that’s what were talking about here.”

A spokeswoman from Albanese’s office said privacy issues would be considered before the roll-out. She said the scanner would produce a “stylised stick figure, not the person’s body”.

She said protocols that govern how the scanners will operate are yet to be drawn up and are currently being developed in consultation with the aviation industry.

And while Albanese has said the body scans would occur at random, his spokeswoman could not confirm whether children would be exempt from scanning, or whether, like some airports in the US, people would be given the option not to be scanned.

According to the physics professor who was the independent scientific advisor to the department of infrastructure for trials held at several airports in 2009, the health risks will depend on which machines the government purchases.

Professor Dudley Creagh from the University of Canberra said there would be no exposure to radiation unless the government purchased X-ray systems. But even then the radiological dose was low and could be compared to what a traveller would be exposed to on a long-distance flight, he said.

“A lot of people don’t realise that there’s a lot of background radiation coming in from extra terrestrial sources [on airplanes].

“The dosage is low compared to the natural radiation that the passenger would have experienced on a long distance trip.”

He said people had no need to worry about privacy because not only were the images distorted, but the operator of the scanner did not see the person in the portal.

“You get presented with a distorted image of a person. It’s a generalised, distorted shape onto which is mapped any deviation from normal.”

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Full Body Airport Scanners and Radiation Exposure

February 12, 2010

Natural News

By Ethan A. Huff

The attempted flight 253 terrorist attack on Christmas Day gave way to the immediate unveiling of full-body human x-ray machines that some alleged experts believe should be installed at every airport in order to ensure national security. These large, expensive machines emit a hefty dose of ionic radiation that can cause DNA damage and may contribute to the development of cancer.

Each time there is a terrorist attack or an attempted terrorist attack, the federal Transportation Security Agency (TSA) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seem to have yet another invasive technology up their sleeve that they claim will make our skies safer. This time, TSA has proposed using giant backscatter x-ray machines on every passenger.

These devices send ionizing radiation a few centimeters into the skin which outputs an image of a passenger’s naked body. TSA officials can then inspect the image to see if a passenger is hiding weapons or other prohibited materials somewhere on or in their bodies.

Aside from the fact that the new protocol is grossly invasive of personal privacy and an obstruction of individual liberty, the ionizing radiation emitted from the machines threatens to damage chromosomal DNA and human cell proteins which can lead to cancer and other problems.

TSA Security Laboratory Directory Susan Hallowell insists that the x-ray technology used in the machines is perfectly safe, equating it to be “about the same as sunshine.” Recent research, however, is indicating that there is virtually no safe level of ionizing radiation; even very low doses can cause significant harm over time.

Dr. John Gofman, Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, has been studying ionizing radiation for years and has determined that low doses can accumulate over time and induce things like cancer and ischemic heart disease. Americans receive x-rays so often that the radiological impact is quite high. Dr. Gofman says that x-rays play a role in 50 percent of cancers and 60 percent of heart diseases in the U.S. In breast cancer, x-rays are a co-factor in about 75 percent of cases.

Since heart disease and cancer are the top two causes of death in the U.S. and x-rays play a role in the majority of cases, it is valid to question the legitimacy of introducing yet one more source of ionizing radiation. The irony is that, according to Dr. Gofman, TSA is responding to an attempted terrorist bombing by suggesting the forcible “bombing” of our DNA with damaging radiation.

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