David - thought you might find this interesting!!!
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Baby is sent through X-ray machine at LAX
By Jennifer Oldham
Times Staff Writer
December 20, 2006
A woman going through security at Los Angeles International Airport put her month-old grandson into a plastic bin intended for carry-on items and slid it into an X-ray machine.
The early Saturday accident — bizarre but not unprecedented — caught airport workers by surprise, even though the security line was not busy at the time, officials said.
A screener watching the machine's monitor immediately noticed the outline of a baby and pulled the bin backward on the conveyor belt.
The infant was taken to Centinela Hospital, where doctors determined that he had not received a dangerous dose of radiation. Officials, who declined to release the 56-year-old woman's name, said she spoke Spanish and apparently did not understand English.
The rare incident drew attention to whether officials are staffing often-busy security checkpoints enough to prevent such an accident. And it raised questions about the danger of X-rays used to pick out suspicious metal shapes in passenger bags, given the medical community's warnings that even low amounts of radiation can build up over a lifetime.
"Rather than focus on the radiation dose, which is a small amount, we need to focus on why this happened, so it doesn't happen again," said Dr. James Borgstede, a diagnostic radiologist at Penrose-St. Francis Health Systems in Colorado Springs, Colo., and president of the American College of Radiology. "Human beings weren't meant to go through those things."
In the several seconds the baby spent in the machine, the doctor added, he was exposed to as much radiation as he would naturally get from cosmic rays — or high energy from outer space — in a day.