Diseases & Conditions
Are full-body airport scanners safe?
The radiation exposure is extremely small, and the cancer risk has been called "truly trivial."
Safe is a tricky, eye-of-the-beholder word and concept. If safe means absolutely zero risk, then the answer to the "Are they safe?" question for scanners that use low-level x-rays is probably no. But if safe means a very small increase in risk — so small that a reasonable person shouldn't be seriously concerned about it — then the answer seems to be yes, they are safe, according to a persuasive article published in 2011 in Archives of Internal Medicine.
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