The Leading Cause of Breast Cancer?

The Danger of CT Scans

by JOHN LaFORGE

Profiteers in the medical CT scan business took a big hit last week from a major new government report on the causes of breast cancer.

Published by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, the exhaustive analysis found that medical radiation, particularly the large radiation dose delivered by CT scans, is the foremost identifiable cause of breast cancer.[1]

Almost 230,480 new cases of breast cancer will be diagnosed this year in the United States, and about 40,000 women will die of the disease, roughly one out of every 3,875 women.

The new Institute of Medicine report probably doesn’t sit well with the industry, hospitals and clinics that make so many millions of dollars selling and over-using CT machines. The authors suggest that women avoid “unnecessary” or “inappropriate” medical radiation, a thinly veiled criticism of the industry that will give you a CT scan for a tooth ache if you don’t object to it.

In 1980, there were 3 million CT scans performed in this country. The number rose to 62 million in 2006,[2] to about 70 million by 2007,[3] and, according to NBC, to 72 million this year.[4] It’s a growth industry that doesn’t care if it promotes tumor growth.

The IOM committee made several suggestions for preventive actions that women can take, and the very first one is to “avoid inappropriate medical radiation exposure.” In the “Question & Answer” section of the IOM analysis online, the authors recommend “Avoiding medical radiation and hormone therapy, unless they are medically necessary, is a good idea.”

This suggestion has a vexing corollary since so-called mammography is just a lower dose of X-radiation given directly to breast tissue. Yet the new IOM study’s authors say in a footnote, “While recognizing the risks of ionizing radiation exposure, particularly for certain higher-dose methods (such as CT scans), it is not the committee’s intent to dissuade women from routine mammography screening.” Yet the advisability of mammography has been under attack ever since the British medical journal The Lancet in Oct. 2006 reported on a study by Dr. Peter Gotzsche that found the produced no health benefits. The late Dr. John Gofman argued for his entire career that X-rays caused more breast cancer then they detect, a position defended at length by Dr. Samuel Epstein in his book The Politics of Cancer.

CT Scans may cause 29,000 cancers and 15,000 cancer deaths every year
NBC News said in 2009 that each whole-body CT scan can deliver as much radiation in 10 minutes as 440 chest X-rays.[5]

The IOM’s authoritative warning against CT scans has to be considered in view of a 2009 study led by the National Cancer Institute which showed that CT scans administered in the year 2007 alone may have contributed to 29,000 new cancer cases and nearly 15,000 cancer deaths in the United States. NBC News noted the report in its Dec. 14, 2009 broadcast under the headline, “15,000 will die from CT scans done in 1 year.”[6]

Dr. Rita Redberg, U. of Calif. San Francisco, told NBC, “We’re getting a lot of radiation from CT scans, there’s a lot of variability in the radiation that we’re getting from different types of CT scans, and there are a lot of excess cancers.”[7]

In view of the license to kill that CT scanners seem to have been given, patients considering medical radiation have to ask themselves Dirty Harry’s famous question, “Do I feel lucky?”

More Body Scanners are Coming to an Airport Near You

Sunday, December 26, 2010 by The Washington Post
by Derek Kravitz

The full-body scanners in use at 78 U.S. airports can detect small amounts of contraband and hidden weapons, all while producing controversial images of travelers.

The "good catches," federal officials say, have largely gone unnoticed amid the criticism that erupted over the ghostly X-rays and "enhanced" pat-downs. The Transportation Security Administration, which intensified airport screening last month, points to several successes: small amounts of marijuana wrapped in baggies, other drugs stitched inside underwear, ceramic knives concealed in shirt pockets.

But the machines could miss something far more deadly: explosive material taped to someone's abdomen or hidden inside a cavity. Researchers and security experts question the technology's ability to detect chemical explosives that are odorless, far smaller than previous incarnations, and easily molded to fool machines and security screeners into thinking they are part of the human body.

Government testing, which has been mostly classified because of security concerns, has also raised concerns about the effectiveness of the full-body scanners.

Based partly on early successes, federal officials are planning to continue an unprecedented roll-out of the technology over the next year. By New Year's Day, about 500 machines will be in use across the country, including at the Washington area's three major airports. By the end of next year, 1,000 X-ray machines will be operational, accounting for roughly half of the nation's 2,000 lanes of security checkpoints.

Following the United States' lead, several nations have begun to test or install full-body scanners, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom. U.S. officials have also considered whether the machines could be used to enhance security at passenger rail stations.

Federal officials say the scanners represent the best technology that has passed both lab and field tests. But as with reading an X-ray, training is the most important factor in making sure that TSA officers can spot potentially dangerous items on passengers.

"The bottom line is that we are now able to detect all types of the most dangerous weapons - nonmetallic explosive devices," TSA spokesman Nicholas Kimball said. "Even in small amounts, it can be picked up."
Window dressing?

Two types of scanning machines - backscatter and millimeter wave - have been installed at airports since 2007, when they were launched as part of a pilot program at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Both machines produce the same full-body images that attracted controversy; they work by bouncing X-rays or radio waves off skin or concealed objects.

They have been installed at a quicker rate since a failed Christmas Day terrorist attempt last year in which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab hid explosives in his underwear on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. The failed attack also prompted federal officials to use the scanners as a primary security technique at airports instead of a secondary, less frequent checkpoint feature.

Still, many security experts say the machines are expensive window dressing meant to put the traveling public at ease.

A recent paper published in the Journal of Transportation Security by two former University of California-San Francisco physicists said that images produced by the backscatter scanners would probably fail to show a large pancake-shaped object taped to the abdomen because it would be "easily confused with normal anatomy." As a result, a third of a kilo of PETN, a type of malleable explosive, which could be discovered by a pat-down, would be missed, the scientists said.

"It's not an explosives detector; it's an anomaly detector," said Clark Ervin, who runs the Homeland Security Program at the nonprofit Aspen Institute. "Someone has to notice that there's something out of order." Ervin was the first inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security.

PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, is hard to detect. Odorless and similar to a white crystal powder, it was used in both package bombs shipped to the United States in October and the Christmas airliner attempt last year. Those who plotted the cargo attack hid the explosive in toner cartridges and "clearly" tried to trick baggage screening technologies, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Brian Michael Jenkins, director of the Transportation Security Center at the Mineta Transportation Institute in San Jose, Calif., said he was unsure whether an advanced scanner would have discovered the explosives in Abdulmutallab's underwear. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has said it "remains unclear" whether he would have been caught by a full-body scanner. But a random assortment of security measures - and not the reliance on one technology or method - is key, Jenkins said.

"It's the mystery that drives our adversaries crazy," he said. "We need the unknown."
Drawbacks, advances

The Transportation Security Laboratory, a federal Homeland Security testing site created in 1992 at New Jersey's Atlantic City International Airport, began testing on full-body scanners in 2007. The detailed results of the testing performed in Atlantic City are classified because of security concerns, but interviews with more than a dozen former and current government officials and the limited release of its findings found:

- The detection of weapons and contraband varied by who was evaluating the images, indicating that some transportation security officers were less adept at spotting unusual or dangerous items.

- The "backscatter" rays can be obscured by body parts and might not readily detect thin items seen "edge-on."

- Objects hidden inside the body, in cavities, might be missed by both types of the scanning machines altogether.

"If you have someone who is rather fat or who has large breasts or buttocks, that's a factor, too," said Anthony Fainberg, a physicist and former program manager for explosives and radiation detection at Homeland Security.

Fainberg has lobbied for hand-held swabbing of hands and luggage for trace detection of explosives, especially on international flights.

"If you have something hidden behind flaps of flesh, it can be missed," he said. "I'm not worried about the safety of it at all, but I am concerned about what could be missed."

Frank Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, said that the technology expands the TSA's security toolbox.

"It is not going to solve the problem, but it certainly comes a long way from where we were before," Cilluffo said. 'These things take time'

To address the litany of security and privacy concerns over the full-body scanners, federal officials are testing several new technologies that will probably make their way into airports in the coming months.

Homeland Security's research and design division, the Science and Technology Directorate, is testing a software patch being developed by the two companies behind the scanning technology - Rapiscan Systems and L-3 Communications - that would produce only a generic outline of a human body accompanied by a box or colored squares indicating a hidden anomaly or specific substance. An alarm might also be used to alert screeners to potential threats.

But TSA Administrator John S. Pistole said that the software, called automated target recognition, is not scoring well in lab tests, producing too many false-positive errors.

"It is a relatively complex math problem, but we're confident we're going to solve it and solve it soon," said Peter Kant, executive vice president of Rapiscan Systems. "But these things take time."

Meanwhile, federal researchers are testing systems that would scan passengers' shoes without having to take them off; a new generation of carry-on baggage equipment, such as conveyor systems; and smaller and faster baggage scanning machines, which could check 1,500 bags per hour, up from an average of 300 to 400 per hour. Technology developed at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory could identify liquids through opaque containers, such as a soda can or juice pouch.

TSA has no regular testing system for its naked body scanners

Cory Doctorow  -- Thursday, Dec 23, 2010

Many experts are skeptical that the TSA's new backscatter pornoscanner machines are safe, but even the experts who endorse them are careful to bracket their reassurances with certain caveats: the safety of the machines depends heavily on their being properly maintained, regularly tested, and expertly operated. Whether or not you're comfortable with the intended radiation emissions from the scanners, no one in their right mind would argue that a broken machine that lovingly lingers over your reproductive organs and infuses them with 10,000 or 100,000 times the normal dosage is desirable.

But when Andrew Schneider, AOL's public health correspondent, contacted the TSA to find out what maintenance and testing is in place to ensure the safe operation of the scanners, he discovered that the TSA appears to have no regime at all to ensure that they are functioning within normal parameters. While the TSA claims that entities like the FDA, the US Army and Johns Hopkins all regularly inspect their machines, none of these groups agrees, and they all disavow any role in regularly maintaining and testing the TSA's equipment (the Army has tested machines in three airports, but has not conducted any further testing). And Johns Hopkins denies that it has certified the machines as safe for operation in the first place -- let alone taking on any ongoing testing and certification program.

For example, the FDA says it doesn't do routine inspections of any nonmedical X-ray unit, including the ones operated by the TSA.

The FDA has not field-tested these scanners and hasn't inspected the manufacturer. It has no legal authority to require owners of these devices -- in this case, TSA -- to provide access for routine testing on these products once they have been sold, FDA press officer said Karen Riley said...

Two-person teams from the Army unit performed surveys of the Advance Image Technology X-ray scanners at just three airports -- in Boston, Los Angeles and Cincinnati, she said. And that was all that the TSA asked the Army to do this year...

"APL's role was to measure radiation coming off the body scanners to verify that it fell within [accepted] standards. We were testing equipment and in no way determined its safety to humans," Helen Worth, head of public affairs for the Johns Hopkins lab, told AOL News.

"Many news articles have said we declared the equipment to be safe, but that was not what we were tasked to do," she added.

Moreover, the study said APL scientists were unable to test a ready-for-TSA scanner at their lab because the manufacturer would not supply one. Instead, the tests were performed on a scanner cobbled together from spare parts in manufacturer Rapiscan Systems' California warehouse.

Airport Body Scanners may be Dangerous According to Scientists

By Agence France-Presse
Friday, November 12th, 2010

WASHINGTON — US scientists warned Friday that the full-body, graphic-image X-ray scanners that are being used to screen passengers and airline crews at airports around the country may be unsafe.

"They say the risk is minimal, but statistically someone is going to get skin cancer from these X-rays," Dr Michael Love, who runs an X-ray lab at the department of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at Johns Hopkins University school of medicine, told AFP.

"No exposure to X-ray is considered beneficial. We know X-rays are hazardous but we have a situation at the airports where people are so eager to fly that they will risk their lives in this manner," he said.

The possible health dangers posed by the scanners add to passengers and airline crews' concerns about the devices, which have been dubbed "naked" scanners because of the graphic image they give of a person's body, genitalia and all.

A regional airline pilot last month refused to go through one of the scanners, calling it an "assault on my person" and a violation of his right to privacy.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) began rolling out full-body scanners at US airports in 2007, but stepped up deployment of the devices this year when stimulus funding made it possible to buy another 450 of the advanced imaging technology scanners.

A group of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) raised concerns about the "potential serious health risks" from the scanners in a letter sent to the White House Office of Science and Technology in April.

Biochemist John Sedat and his colleagues said in the letter that most of the energy from the scanners is delivered to the skin and underlying tissue.

"While the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high," they wrote.

The Office of Science and Technology responded this week to the scientists' letter, saying the scanners have been "tested extensively" by US government agencies and were found to meet safety standards.

But Sedat told AFP Friday that the official response was "deeply flawed."

"We still don't know the beam intensity or other details of their classified system," he said, adding that UCSF scientists were preparing a rebuttal to the White House statement.

Some 315 "naked" scanners are currently in use at 65 US airports, according to the TSA.