Posts Tagged ‘airline safety’  Is the TSA deadlier than
the terrorists?  November 22, 2010 4 comments
Rocky ”demonstrates” that the TSA’s backscatter x-ray screening
 may be  “deadlier” than the terrorists — unless the terrorists
succeed in blowing up an airplane every few years.  From this
generally accepted statistic:  A typical dental X-ray exposes
the patient to about 2 millirems of radiation. According to one
widely cited estimate, exposing each of 10,000 people to one rem
(that is, 1,000 millirems) of radiation will likely lead to 8
excess cancer deaths. Using our assumption of linearity, that
means that exposure to the 2 millirems of a typical dental X-ray
would lead an individual to have an increased risk of dying from
cancer of 16 hundred-thousandths of one percent. Given that very
small risk, it is easy to see why most rational people would
choose to undergo dental X-rays every few years to protect their
teeth.More importantly for our purposes, assuming that the
radiation in a backscatter X-ray is