Those new airport scanners......

[s2art]

Some evidence that terahertz radiation may not be that safe...

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0910/0910.5294...

Oh good, now we add a cancer risk to flying.

[G_T]

Had an, admittedly brief, read of that paper. I wouldn't panic just yet, it was clearly written by a Physicist and not a toxicologist.

Significant DNA damage seems unlikely given the exposure time and the rate of Mitosis. Given the ungodly level of radiation you're exposed to on a flight anyway I think it will be irrelevant.

They also seem to cite "behavioural changes in mice" after 5 minutes exposure? How on Earth is that relevant?

Edited by G_T on Friday 8th January 16:11

[Frankeh]

The registers got a good article on why scanners wont change a damn thing.
I'm confident that with about £20K and a few months planning, I could take a plane down.

And I've got stopped every time I've got on a plane.

[s2art]

G_T said:

Had an, admittedly brief, read of that paper. I wouldn't panic just yet, it was clearly written by a Physicist and not a toxicologist.

Significant DNA damage seems unlikely given the exposure time and the rate of Mitosis. Given the ungodly level of radiation you're exposed to on a flight anyway I think it will be irrelevant.

They also seem to cite "behavioural changes in mice" after 5 minutes exposure? How on Earth is that relevant?

Edited by G_T on Friday 8th January 16:11

Its relevant if its causing changes in brain chemistry.

Re your first point. The issue appears to be that DNA resonates to this frequency of radiation, thus a probabalistic effect in causing strand separation. The sort of additional radiation we receive at altitude doesnt do that.

[G_T]

s2art said:

Its relevant if its causing changes in brain chemistry.

Re your first point. The issue appears to be that DNA resonates to this frequency of radiation, thus a probabalistic effect in causing strand separation. The sort of additional radiation we receive at altitude doesnt do that.

Changes in brain chemistry would seem very unlikely unless they can put up a fairly decent mechanism. Does the article do that? Animal behaviour studies are notoriously unscientific because of the number of factors that are difficult to account for i.e. perhaps the mice heard the vibration of the transformer and altered their behaviour based on this?

If there is difficulty in strand seperation then cancers would not occur because Mitotic division would be inhibited not carry on unabaited like what occurs in tumours.

As I said mitotic cell division takes place over a period of approximately 12-24hours. Even if you are exposed to this type of radiation for 30 seconds that only represents significantly less than 1% of the total division time. Given the bodies DNA repair mechanisms and no proven mechanism for uncontrolled tumour growth I find it incredibly unlikely that it would do you any harm.

Well cosmic and X-ray radiation doesn't resonate DNA (that I'm aware of) but what it does certainly do is exposure the passenger to a great deal of radiation that will damage DNA in a proven mechanism for hours at a time. Add a couple of solar winds and the hypothesis proposed in this paper seems incredibly irrelvant even if it's true...

ETA: Since you were worried about cancer risks during flying have a read of this; http://www.hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q444.html

Seems the real danger with that in mind!

Edited by G_T on Friday 8th January 16:42