OT: airport scanners in the news

When traveling, I’ve often wondered why the TSA agents don’t wear the little dosimetry badges that all medical and dental personnel who work around X-rays wear on their lapels. It’s a standard safety precaution in the industry, another method of ensuring that medical personnel aren’t inadvertently getting exposed to too much radiation at work.
Well, here’s an article from TIME magazine on this very topic. It turns out that a few TSA agents in Boston have developed various cancers, and they’re wondering if it’s linked to their X-ray screening equipment. If they had been wearing dosimetry badges, they would have known if X-ray leakage was a problem!
The TIME magazine report also implies that the X-ray based machines may not have been as rigorously tested for safety as some might like…