The European Union has banned the use of full-body airport scanners that use x-rays "in order not to risk jeopardizing citizens' health and safety."
The 27 European countries that are part of the European Union will no longer use backscatter scanners -- which use very low levels of x-rays to produce anatomically correct images of passengers, according to a European Commission press release.
The other type of scanning technology used by airports -- millimeter wave scanners, which use radio waves and do not expose people to x-rays -- are still allowed to be used in European airports as long as they don't store a copy of the images. In addition, the human reviewer must be in a separate location from the person being scanned, and the image shouldn't be linked to the screened person.
Ever since the "underwear bomber" attempted to blow up a plane flying from Amsterdam to Detroit with hidden explosives on Christmas Day in 2009, the U.S. has been ramping up the use of full-body scanners. While most of the controversy over the scanners has focused on privacy issues, a few scientists also have raised concerns about the ionizing radiation emitted by backscatter machines, because ionizing radiation has been linked to cancer.
However, consensus among radiation experts and medical physicists is that the scanners used in airports produce such minuscule levels of radiation that they pose no real health risks. People are exposed to the equivalent of the amount of radiation from a backscatter scanner from two minutes of flying in an airplane, from sleeping next to another person for the night, and from 40 minutes of just living.
A traveler would require more than 1,000 such scans in a year to reach the effective dose equal to one standard chest x-ray, the American College of Radiology (ACR) said in a statement last year.
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