Younger Americans overexposed to radiation risk

I thought I'd bring this to the attention of my American fellow ATSers.

I know a lot of people are a little dubious of Reuters but anyway, it may be an issue for some of you!

Reuters

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Younger Americans are being exposed to worrisome amounts of radiation from medical scans that increase their risk of cancer, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

They said the cumulative risk of repeated exposure to radiation from medical scans is a public health threat that needs to be addressed.

"Even though the individual risk for any patient exposed to these kinds of doses may be small, when you add that up over millions of people, that can be a concerning population risk," Dr. Reza Fazel of Emory University in Atlanta and colleagues wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Their three-year study of nearly 1 million Americans aged 18 to 64 suggests that as many as 4 million Americans a year are exposed to what they viewed as high doses of radiation.

I know for myself, if I have the need for some kind of medical scan, I always check to make sure it is totally necessary. I hate having x-rays though, they always need to "Get just one more" and that really worries me.

A telling statistic:

A report in March by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement found that Americans are exposed to seven times more radiation from diagnostic scans than in 1980.

I the end it boils down to the benefits of the scan (correct diagnosis of medical problems) versus the harm of the scan.

Maybe we should all just get our doctors to check through our medical histories and help us decide.

[edit on 26-8-2009 by kiwifoot]

Thank goodness for all those xrays and CT scans that I've had!

Maybe I'll start glowing in the dark soon.

OK, so the exposure increased 7-fold. It's still comparable or probably less than the dosage you get when you fly in an airplane, cross-country.