A new study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine concludes that full body airport scanners pose no health risk to passengers.

The study was conducted by Rebecca Smith-Bindman and Pratik Mehta, two doctors at the University of California in San Francisco.

The pair confirmed what many experts had said previously: passengers are exposed to more radiation during one to three minutes of flight-time than they are when passing through body scanners.

Despite this latest reassurance of scanner safety, privacy issues persist in the mind of the public.

On this issue, the study’s authors offered a sophisticated “no comment.”

“We try to balance risks and benefits of everything we do,” they wrote, “and thus while the risks are indeed exceedingly small, the scanners should not be deployed unless they provide benefit — improved national security and safety — and consideration of these issues is outside the scope of our expertise.”

Source: Washington Post