The police look for drugs and find.............

[Apex]

Just a hint of paranoia there?
But the police are between a rock and a hard place. If they act to prevent a crime that may result in a loss of ife, they are accused of being athoritarian. If they fail to act and life is lost, they are , incompetent. While I value civil iberty, I am prepared to surrender some for that for additional security, but my anger is reserved for those that have exploited our civil liberty for their own ends, and made the erosions necessary.

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

<seems i got beat to that snippet>

[aidanjt]

But you chose to fly, which icreased your exposure to gamma radiation of much shorter wavelength than those employed by body scanners

Almost all of which, will pass right through you. CBR also contains a blend of beta particles, alpha particles, and even positrons, which will annihilate any electrons it comes in contact with and emit high energy gamma. However, as I already pointed out that CBR isn't the same as backscatter X-ray. Our biology evolved to tolerate a certain level of random and unfocused background radiation. It didn't evolve to tolerate a focused and sustained beam targeting specific tissues. It's like comparing a light bulb to a laser, and saying just because the light bulb is harmless, laser light of lesser energy must be harmless as well.

True, but the point was to counter the Daily Mailesque comment that body scannig "massively" increases the risk. It doesn't. Not even the dose I received 'massively' increses the risk.

So you just got irradiated for fun, right? No, you got irradiated to obliterate some undesirable cells (hence to use of more energy). The radiation was focused on those cells. And there is no such thing as a 'safe' dose of ionising radiation. It only takes 1 particle to damage a strand of DNA and turn a cell into a rampaging cancer, the event is completely random. And with the focusing effect of backscatter, the increased concentration of particles across your skin starts making that more likely to happen than not. This doesn't obliterate cells like with your treatment, it can leave them in a dysfunctional, but still operating state.

[peterb]

Whatever - CBA!