Minutus

I like that plan!

Here are some links that will help get a grasp of the information put out, which appears to be deliberately confusing, wrong, and missing vital facts.
A quick summary of what they tell you:

There are not two types of scanners available but three: (1) x-ray backscatter; (2) active millimetre-wave imaging, sending microwaves right through the body; and (3) passive millimetre-wave imaging, which simply takes a picture of the infrared radiation produced by the subject.

None of them would have picked up the bomb whose detection supposedly touched all this off.

The first two kinds are both planned to be in use in airports worldwide, and both are already in use at Heathrow and Manchester. The third kind, the passive millimetre-wave imager, is the only safe one, and the U.K. and U.S. Governments have failed to mention it as an alternative. Public discussion having mysteriously focused on the "kiddiporn" concern ("solved" by having the pornographer and the viewer in two different rooms!), no mention is made of the facts concerning safety; instead, "experts" are dredged up to make unsubstantiable claims as to safety.

"Experts" paid to state that either of the first two scanners is safe are wilfully ignorant, unbelievably stupid, or lying through their teeth. The so-called terahertz (i.e. 1,000,000,000,000 Hz) machines turn out to be 96 GHz (i.e. 96,000,000,000), squarely in the microwave part of the spectrum.

There is no known safe dose for x-rays, which do not merely bounce off the skin but pass through the body, ionizing sensitive molecules (such as DNA) along the way. The smallest doses yet studied cause DNA damage leading to cancers and other degenerative diseases. There is no known safe dose for 96 GHz microwaves. Presumably the passive millimetre-wave machines cost a little more than the others, or there are bigger kickbacks for the other machines because they cost far more; I haven't explored this at all. Think about how little you see anywhere about the effects of mobile-phone radiation in breaking DNA strands, triggering enzyme cascades, and doing other damage in the brain linked to many diseases now on the increase, despite thousands of published studies in the field.
Details:

gives an overview of the electromagnetic spectrum. As you can see, the terahertz radiation that some "experts" allege is being used is borderline microwave-infrared. Microwave radiation has effects similar to those Dr J. just mentioned.

discusses in detail the uselessness of the scanners for their intended purpose.

gives the usual pat assurances that we can all go back to sleep, but mentions something interesting: that a typical CT scan of the chest delivers 100 times as much radiation as the typical chest x-ray (discontinued after decades of use as a routine measure after government authorities became unable to avoid the finding that they caused cancers -- a political process still to mature in relation to mammograms, which have been proven to increase breast-cancer rates by 150% to 250% in susceptible women but are unlikely for some time to give way to alternatives such as discussed here ).

mentions the use of both scanners in U.K. airports and gives further pat assurances (including the use of the scanners only for suspicious or profiled characters).

gives much of the technical information stated in the summary above.

gives a reasonable, if wandering, critical analysis of the pap that passes for communication of assuring results of responsible investigation -- and mentions conflicts of interest in the U.S. Specifically, the former head of Homeland Security is mentioned as making the case for the scanners via the revolving-door syndrome, meaning apparently that he now works for a scanner manufacturer.
In short: there is a safe scanner the governments could be using -- a passive imager, which produces no radiation of its own -- but they have chosen instead to use two dangerous, active imagers without explanation.

I've suggested on the Australian Vaccination Network list, and will repeat here, that now is an awfully good time to get in touch with and even join a civil-liberties group. Such groups are the natural focus of campaigns concerning encroachments on our freedoms.
Cheers --

John
I thought I saved those articles but I cannot find them in my computer....anyway from memory, the "radiation" used is in the range of "terahertz" which seems to create "bubbles" within the strands of DNA and separate them at some places....you can imagine the consequences.
My personal plan, if asked to go through it, is to immediately offer a full body search instead of the scan, and I will clearly and very loudly mention in public that I am ready to strip naked right here, right now and even let them do a cavity search in public...................let's see who will back off first............
Dr. J. Rozencwajg, NMD.
"The greatest enemy of any science is a closed mind"
Visit my new website www.naturamedica.webs.com

Hi, Sheri -- yes, you're most welcome. It's limited in detail, of course.
But here are a couple more details:
The U.S. army places the same safety limit on radiation in both the 300MHz to 6GHz range and the 6 GHZ to 96 GHz range: as of 2007, 10 mW per square cm of full-body exposure ( >) (and double that intensity for exposure of any part of the body). The Salzburg Resolution by health experts from around the world, on June 7-8 2000, noting that "There is at present evidence of no threshold for adverse health effects", recommended a cautionary limit on "the total of all high-frequency radiation" of 1/1000 of that figure: 10 microwatts per square cm (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m ... i_87720001).
To see what this means in terms of a whole person, let's take two people:
(1) a person of mass 50 kg (110 lb) and height 167 cm (5' 6"), who will typically have a body surface area, in square cm, of about 10,000*SQRT(50*167/3600), or 15,230 square cm; and
(2) a person of mass 75 kg (165 lb) and height 180 cm (5' 11"), who will typically have a body surface area, in square cm, of about 10,000*SQRT(75*180/3600), or 19,365 square cm.
The Salzburg Resolution's safety limit on total body exposure of 10 microwatts per square cm would allow a total body exposure
• for person #1 of 10 microwatts * 15,230 = 150 mW, and,
• for person #2, of 10 microwatts * 19,365 = 190 mW.
Now let's compare these figures for the maximum total whole-body exposure recommended by the Salzburg Resolution with the radiation intensities promoted by the U.K. and U.S. Governments as perfectly safe: 80 mW/kg of body mass for exposure of the whole body, or 1600 mW/kg of body mass for any particular gram of your body.
The exposure to mobile-phone radiation that your governments tell you is safe is easily calculated as follows.
• Person #1: 80 mW/kg * 50 kg = 4000 mW (whole body).
• Person #2: 80 mW/kg * 75 kg = 6000 mW (whole body).
In summary,
(1) International health experts agree that a teenager or small adult of height 167 cm and mass 50 kg should not be exposed to a total electromagnetic radiation intensity (including mobile phones, radio, television, and full-body scanner) of more than 150 mW; but your government is already prepared to expose that person to 4000 mW from her mobile phone alone, more than 2500% in excess of the safety recommendation.
(2) International health experts agree that a large adult of height 180 cm and mass 75 kg should not be exposed to a total electromagnetic radiation intensity (including mobile phones, radio, television, and full-body scanner) of greater than 190 mW; but your government is already prepared to expose that adult to 6000 mW from his mobile phone alone, more than 3000% in excess of the recommendation.
Given such a cavalier attitude to a device that is already linked with brain tumours, cancers, Alzheimer's disease, autism, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, and a host of other intractable ills, I'd be placing no bets on any care by your government or mine about limiting microwave hazards from body scanners on the basis of our health! The carefully confusing reports about the scanner technologies to be used, the absence on the web of all technical detail concerning power output of the microwave scanners, and the ludicrous claims of x-rays that are too weak to penetrate skin merely confirm that the only grave concern that these technologies presently cause the colluding governments is concern lest we begin thinking clearly about the repercussions of its implementation.
One or two people can't stop this by themselves. If you don't want this highly dangerous radiation hazard imposed on you, then you must get in touch with your parliamentary representatives and say so.
Kind regards,
John

Sorry, typo below. The U.S. Army figures were current as of 1997, not 2007.

Cheers --

John
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"There is nothing more dangerous than blind passion in science. This is a direct path to unjustified self-confidence, to loss of self-criticalness, to scientific fanaticism, to false science. Given support from someone in power, it can lead to suppression of true science and, since science is now a matter of state importance, to inflicting great injury on the country."

-- N.N. Semyonov, Science Does Not Tolerate Subjectivism. Science and Life 1965;4:38

Sounds like fly and die

John Harvey schreef:

Julie, thank you very much for digging that out.

A suggestion appears below in bold as to the probing questions that we should all be asking the authorities regarding the terahertz scanners.
A brief, easy introduction to that research may be found here: , and a slightly briefer version with different graphs, here: .
The study itself, "DNA Breathing Dynamics in the Presence of a Terahertz Field", by B.S. Alexandrov, V. Gelev, A.R. Bishop, A. Usheva, and K.Ø. Rasmussen, may be found at .
An excerpt from the easy introduction at the first links:
"The evidence that terahertz radiation damages biological systems is mixed. 'Some studies reported significant genetic damage while others, although similar, showed none', say Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a few buddies. Now these guys think they know why.
"Alexandrov and co have created a model to investigate how THz fields interact with double-stranded DNA and what they've found is remarkable. They say that although the forces generated are tiny, resonant effects allow THz waves to unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication. That's a jaw dropping conclusion.
"And it also explains why the evidence has been so hard to garner. Ordinary resonant effects are not powerful enough to do do this kind of damage but nonlinear resonances can. These nonlinear instabilities are much less likely to form which explains why the character of THz genotoxic effects are probabilistic rather than deterministic, say the team.
"This should set the cat among the pigeons. Of course, terahertz waves are a natural part of environment, just like visible and infrared light. But a new generation of cameras are set to appear that not only record terahertz waves but also bombard us with them. And if our exposure is set to increase, the question that urgently needs answering is what level of terahertz exposure is safe."
The study itself makes mention of several points worth noting for discussions of this topic:
(1) Previous research on the possible health effects has been based "mostly at frequencies below 0.01 Terahertz [i.e. 10 gigahertz], power below 1 mW/square cm, and short exposure times. The data collected in these conditions led to mixed conclusions: some studies reported significant genetic damages while others, although similar, showed none [4]. The major international research project, "THz-bridge" [5], which was specifically concerned with THz radiation genotoxicity concluded that: under some specific conditions of exposure, change in membrane permeability of liposomes was detected and an induction of genotoxicity was observed to occur in lymphocytes."
(2) "It is clearly seen that for driving frequencies below Ω ∼ 2.5 THz spatially homogeneous (k = 0) perturbations lead to the strongest instability (occurring at the lowest value of the driving amplitude). However, above Ω ∼ 2.5 THz the staggered (k = π) perturbation becomes the primary instability mode."
In other words, it is worth asking the authorities claiming that these active terahertz transmitters are safe to state:
(a) what frequency they emit at;
(b) the maximum wattage per square centimetre with which they irradiate the subject;
(c) whether the emissions are spatially homogeneous or staggered; and
(d) whether under these conditions the emissions are definitively known and can be guaranteed to be free of the mutational effects described in October 2009 by Alexandrov et al. of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in the paper "DNA Breathing Dynamics in the Presence of a Terahertz Field", available at .
Enough such enquiries suggesting that fudging all the technical details is not going to work forever may worry those who so far have given no thought to the public-health consequences of their actions.
Incidentally, I'd like informed advice on this, but it seems probable that references to emissions as being either "spatially homogeneous" or "staggered" are merely translations of what we'd more usually call "coherent" (with the photons all in phase, as light from a laser is) and "incoherent" (in mixed phases).
And for those of a more technical bent: though the text describes the DNA-pair susceptibility to "staggered" radiation as occurring primarily at frequencies above 2.5 THz (2500 GHz), the second part of the paper's Figure 2 shows instability also below 0.4 THz (400 GHz) and in the region between 1.5 THz (1500 GHz) and 2.2 THz (2200 GHz). In those regions, it would seem, both "spatially homogeneous" and "staggered" radiation induce instability and pair-breaking.
Cheers --
John

Thank you everyone for the great links!

Tikva Sasson