Following the Christmas day bomb attempt on a US aircraft, the British and American governments have vowed to tighten airport security, including plans for CT body scanners. This has raised concerns – not least that the images generated by the scanner would infringe on personal privacy. The more pressing issue for me is radiation exposure. How big a dose will these scanners deliver, and can we be reassured that they are not going to do us harm? Attitudes towards radiation have changed over the years. While nowadays doctors are told to justify every single exposure, this has not always been the case. In the US, in the 1920s, children’s shoe shops often used x-ray machines to assess whether shoes and feet were a good match. (The trend reached the UK later.)

There were no warnings about overuse or risks to pregnant women, and it wasn’t until 1949 that a paper appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine questioning the practice. In 1956 a paper appeared in the British Medical Journal investigating the radiation dose from machines made in the UK. Attention was also drawn to case reports of children with abnormalities of the leg, thought to be due to radiation. The authors didn’t propose a ban, but they did suggest regulation.

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