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Tuesday, November
16, 2010
My head still isn't working properly, so I am not going to try any
profundities. I hear a great stir about the new Congressional members-elect
and the tons of advice being handed them. Rush Limbaugh is making fun of
some of it, to wit, that incoming Congresscritters will be showered with
attention from attractive women, some of them lobbyists, others just power
freaks, and this will be a danger to all, but particularly to the
unattractive incoming Congresscritters. I suppose it's easy to make fun of
the notion, but it certainly is true, and it's not really a laughing matter.
Power and fame are aphrodisiacs, and there will be professional lobbyists
targeting the incoming Members and Senators. You never know how many friends
you have until you are in Washington with power.
There is a strange malady that afflicts those who come to Washington. It
is sometimes called Beltway Fever. The symptoms are a delusion that only
what happens inside the Beltway -- the Freeway system that encircles the
District -- matters. There may be a country out there beyond the Beltway,
but what's important is that which happens inside. Everyone I know is
subject to Beltway Fever, and it is surprising how quickly it can take hold
and change behavior. The only long time resident of DC I know who resisted
this disease was the late General Dan Graham, and even he was susceptible
while he had his office suite on K Street, and some of his staff were
definitely infected. It became easier to resist when they moved High
Frontier out of K Street to a more suburban location.
We may be sure that some of the Tea Party members will be infected, and
it will be interesting to chart the progress of the disease. Perhaps their
constituents will keep reminding them of why they were elected.
=================
The Republicans must always keep in mind that this wave election was not
a validation of the Republican Party, just as the 2008 wave election was not
a validation of the Democratic Party. Both were cries of anguish and demands
for a change of course. The Republican establishment doesn't want to believe
that, but they disbelieve at their peril. This election was an opportunity,
not a validation. Validation will come with some dramatic changes. Those
changes must be large, significant, and very visible.
One such change of course will be a real debate on the cost/effectiveness
of "green" technologies and the entire Global Warming question. Is the Earth
warming? (Probably.) Is this a disaster? (Probably not; depends on how
much.) (Should we be concerned about rising CO2 levels? (Short term,
probably not, but we should not ignore it. We ought to be looking for
geo-engineering ways to reduce atmospheric CO2.) Should we reduce our CO2
output? (Depends on how we do it, and how much we have to spend to do it.
Costs should include the cost of reduced energy available for economic
growth. Note that nuclear power plants do not give off CO2 and do produce
energy.)
And I suspect I am rambling. I do hope to recover from this bug.
============
Regarding the TSA incidents:
The new backscatter X-ray machines sound formidable, but as I understand
it, any passenger on an hour or more flight is going to get more radiation
from being at altitude than from the x-ray, and that by a factor of more
than 2.
Low-Level Radiation Exposure
Your correspondent "Pilot" asserts "(R)epeated
exposure to even very low radiation doses is undeniably dangerous...".
While the evidence either way is slim, there is one
large-scale human study, done entirely by accident, facilitated by an
incredible feat of human stupidity, that argues just the opposite.
See
http://www.jpands.org/vol9no1/chen.pdf for the detailed writeup.
In 1982 or 1983, at a hospital in Taiwan,
radioactive medical cobalt-60 (1/2 life 5.3 years) sources were somehow
thrown into normal trash, rather than sequestered properly. These sources,
resembling chunks of steel, were recycled into rebar, and apartment
buildings built. People moved in, lived, loved, raised children, all while
being exposed continuously to low-level radiation many times higher than
background, and several times higher than the maximum allowed dosages.
Eventually, someone noticed that the buildings were
"hot". Someone else realized that this was a once-in-human-history
opportunity to get priceless human experimental data, that could never be
gotten any other way. They tracked down everyone they could find who had
ever lived in those apartments, 4000 families. Those people will be
followed and medically monitored, closely, for the rest of their lives.
According to one source, the preliminary result is that the cancer rates
for those 4000 families are 3.6% of the rate for Taiwan as a whole.
A *reduction* in cancer rate of over 90% is not a
result that can be dismissed easily.
Of course, "Pilot"'s assertion may be checked a bit
more easily, by looking at airline pilots and flight attendants flying US
coast-to-coast, trans-Atlantic, and especially trans-Pacific hops. A
6-hour US coast-to-coast hop gives everyone on the airplane radiation
exposure equivalent to a chest X-ray. The trans-Pacific hop, Dallas-Tokyo
Narita, is 13 hours one-way: call it two chest X-rays. (I fly that hop
typically four times a year: two out, two back.) Considering that pilots,
and especially flight attendants, routinely fly those hops day in, day
out, if there is in fact elevated risk associated with daily chest X-ray
equivalent exposure, we would reasonably expect aircrew to be dropping
like flies, from cancer. I don't know about you, but I haven't heard about
astronomical cancer levels among former airline pilots and retired flight
attendants. (Also note that aircrew health insurance premiums would be
sky-high if such a concentration of cancer cases had been found: insurance
companies are not stupid.)
--John R. Strohm
With a few exceptions by "radiation is bad for you, period" protestors,
the hormesis argument -- a little radiation is better for you than none, but
more is not better, and a lot is dangerous -- seems to be prevalent among
those who have studied the matter. My friend Klaus Nordquist was formerly
the medical colonel of the Swedish Life Guards regiment, and one of his
studies involved conscripts from various areas of Sweden, some with high
natural background radiation, some with none; his conclusion was that
conscripts from the high background areas were actually healthier than those
from other areas. Given that he had access to what amounts to the entire
male population of Swedes of a certain age, this seems close to definitive.
There are many other published studies of hormesis vs. the linear (all
radiation causes damage) hypothesis, and the principle of hormesis seems to
me to be established, but I note that Wikipedia and other pop science
sources tend to be doubtful. There are many studies.
(1)
(2)
Pilots and general doctors are laymen too when it
comes to radiation. All your talk about flux rates and skin concentration
comes from the UCSF letter (
http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=
http://www.npr.org/assets/news/
2010/05/17/concern.pdf&pli=1 ) written by four UCSF professors in
relevant fields.
The FDA response (
http://www.fda.gov
/Radiation-EmittingProducts/Radiation
EmittingProductsandProcedures/
SecuritySystems/ucm231857.htm ) goes through their list of concerns
point by point and refutes it all. The UCSF guys still aren't satisfied,
though, but until they respond again, we won't know why. I'd suggest
reading both fully if you want to speak with any authority on the subject.
Since you want to talk about rems, let's talk about
rems. Specifically, the upper limit for a backscatter scan in terms of
effective dosage is 0.01 millirems (mrems). The effective dose
received from an hour of flight at cruising altitude is 0.5 mrems. If
your average pilot flies 75 hours a month, 12 months a year, for a total
of 900 hours * 0.5 mrems, he's getting 450 mrems of radiation from cosmic
rays. Let's add this to the 360 mrems your average American receives
annually from all sources: bananas, old eye-glasses, television sets,
concrete, the natural background and cosmic rays, medical imaging, and
whatever else. Now, the single-source yearly limit for radiation is 25
mrems, which is what you'd get from 1,000 backscatter scans once you
correct for flux and "concentration" and all that. I doubt pilots are
getting scanned nearly three times a day, every day. Add all of this up
for a whopping 835 mrems out of the occupational yearly limit of 5,000.
Sorry, but flying is more dangerous to your health in terms of radiation
than backscatter scans, and the amount they pile on to whatever you
receive already is statistically insignificant. A single banana doses you
with as much radiation as a backscatter scan.
These machines have been around since 1992. We've
known about x-rays for 115 years. None of this is new to us. Additionally,
backscatter technology utilizes the Compton effect to get its images
(radiation bounces back to a camera), unlike medical imaging which sends
radiation straight through you to a camera on the other side (causing the
photoelectric effect instead). They're both ionizing, but Compton
scattering photons impart less energy to the electrons they knock out of
orbit, while the photoelectric effect photons completely add their energy
to electrons and disappear. Also, the state of California says nearly
everything causes cancer.
On privacy concerns: if you've seen the real images
(
http://upload.wikimedia.org/
wikipedia/commons/2/2d/
Backscatter_x-ray_image_woman.jpg ), you'll notice this is slightly
less detailed than a woman in a bikini. Backscatter nearly penetrates your
skin and shows what's slightly underneath, so there is no real surface
detail. TSA's machines also have a filtering program that blurs the face
and other features for privacy, without detracting from the
object-detection potential of the machine. On top of all of this, the
person viewing the images is in an off-site location, removed from the
screening floor. He cannot personally see the person corresponding to the
images coming up on his screen. He communicates the location of objects to
the person on the screening floor via radio. Additionally, it's TSA policy
that during shift changes, the person in the viewing room wait five
minutes from the time of his last scan before exiting, so there's little
chance he will bump into anyone he saw recently. It would be extremely
difficult to pick someone out of a crowd and say, "Yes, that's the person
I saw on the machine." I'm not saying no one should be offended or
embarrassed by the scans, but just drawing attention to how the procedure
actually works for those who formed opinions based on misinformation.
I used to work for TSA and quit a while back. I'm
not the organization's biggest fan, but I also can't stand the allegations
made against them, like that the new pat-downs are somehow "groping".
There's no cupping of the breast or testicles. The policy states you slide
a flat hand up the side of your thigh until it hits resistance. Anyone
claiming otherwise is lying out of their ass or had the world's worst
screener. There's enough wrong with TSA that you can argue against it
until the cows come home without inventing stories.
I have bold-faced two statements in the above. I believe they are true,
and if true, are definitive; hormesis is not involved. The additional
radiation from the x-ray is lost in the noise. Regarding the privacy
concerns, I have no confidence in Wikipedia as a primary data source where
there is any controversy at all, but I don't find the privacy concerns very
important here.
I have long been of the opinion that TSA is not very effective and its
major purpose is to convince the American Citizen that he/she is no longer a
citizen, but a subject to be ordered about by "Federal Officers." I have
long argued that in the normal course of events, "Federal Officers" ought
never to be able to act without cooperation of the local sheriff; the
Constitution did not contemplate routine law enforcement by Federal Agents
in matters other than customs and immigration. The "Revenue Agents" created
to enforce the Whiskey Tax were the first exception to this rule and in my
judgment it was a mistake: they were exempted from having to work with local
law enforcement because local law enforcement in those days was greatly in
sympathy with the Whiskey Rebellion. The eventual result of that was the
Waco Massacre, which would never have happened had the BATF -- the Revenoors
-- had to work with the local sheriff. Same with Ruby Ridge and other such
sporting events for Lon Horiuchi.
But if we assume that TSA is needed, then the backscatter X-ray is
probably as non-intrusive a way to implement its primary mission of keeping
passengers from carrying weapons or infernal machines. I suspect that if we
abolish the TSA and go back to each airline implementing its own system we
would be just as safe, but then I said that back when they were forming TSA.
The 9/11 attacks can't happen now. Bringing down an airplane if you don't
mind being killed in doing it has always been a possible option and seldom
happens; and it's not all that likely that TSA is able to prevent it. The
American public seems to have been convinced that TSA security (or security
theater) is necessary. If so, the new system is probably as good as any.
I know that's not going to be a popular opinion with my readers.
Today's mail will have a
lot of alternate views.
But assuming that the ratio of radiation received on a normal flight to
that received by a backscatter xray is really 0.5/0.01 = 50/1, it does not
seem to be a health hazard, and is less offensive to me than the unctuous
Uriah Heep "deference" of the TSA agents, who continue to make us understand
that we are subjects, not citizens. And I suspect that many of them like
that job.
==============
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