With everything that air travelers must contend with these days, they can at least wipe one worry off their list. Those full body scanners being deployed at some airports are safe, according to experts.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration supports two types of technologies: Either millimeter wave technology or backscatter technology.

Millimeter wave uses radio signals akin to cell phone RF energy. Since the millimeter waves are low-level radio waves, the radiation is non-ionizing and so it is considered completely safe.

And the backscatter rays are too weak to be a worry.

"It's important that passengers don't equate this screening with the screening that their bags undergo," assures Mike Hanley, M.D. a radiology resident at the Medical University of South Carolina. He tells DOTmed News that you'd get 80 times more radiation per day just from the natural background than from an airport scan. Put another way, 200 airport security scans equal the radiation from a seven-hour flight.

The American College of Radiology is also alleviating fliers' concerns.

"Backscatter technology uses extremely weak X-rays delivering less than 10 microRem of radiation per scan -- the radiation equivalent one receives inside an aircraft flying for two minutes at 30,000 feet," ACR reports. "An airline passenger flying cross-country is exposed to more radiation from the flight than from screening by one of these devices. The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement (NCRP) has reported that a traveler would need to experience 2,500 backscatter scans per year to reach what they classify as a Negligible Individual Dose. The American College of Radiology (ACR) agrees with this conclusion."

So worry about terrorism--or those embarrassing see-through scans--but not radiation exposure.

Read what TSA is doing:
http://www.tsa.gov/approach/tech/imaging_technology.shtm

Get information from ACR:
http://www.radiologyinfo.org

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