TSA's mm-Wave Body Scanner Breaks Diabetic Teen's $10K Insulin Pump

OverTheGeicoE writes "Savannah Barry, a Colorado teenager, was returning home from a conference in Salt Lake City. She is a diabetic and wears an insulin pump to control her insulin levels 24/7. She carries documentation of her condition to assist screeners, who usually give her a pat-down search. This time the screeners listened to her story, read her doctor's letter, and forced her to go through a millimeter-wave body scanner anyway. The insulin pump stopped working correctly, and of course, she was subjected to an invasive manual search. 'My life is pretty much in their hands when I go through a body scan with my insulin pump on,' she says. She wants TSA screeners to have more training. Was this a predictable outcome, considering that no one outside TSA has access to millimeter-wave scanners for testing? Would oversight from the FDA or FCC prevent similar incidents from happening in the future?"

Comments

EMC compliance

[necro81]

FYI: medical products, especially ones that have the potential to kill if they malfunction, have to undergo substantial testing to demonstrate their immunity to electromagnetic interference. This includes stuff like TV, radio, and cellular transmissions, microwave ovens and WiFi. There are also special field frequency/strength combinations, such as the typical medical detector or consumer anti-theft device.

However, there aren't regulations regarding immunity to mm-wave and THz scanners, and certainly not at the intensities these devices use. I suspect that, if you were to test a broad range of existing medical products, many of them would fail, because many of them have mm-scale electrical features (especially, circuit board traces) that would be highly susceptible.

Re:EMC compliance

[Cassini2]

From an electrical point of view, many medical devices are simply to sensitive to be made immune to induced interference. The noise will have to affect them some how. It is just a matter of how big the noise source is (magnitude), the frequency of the noise source (Hz), and what geometry it sits relative to the medical device (coupling.)

Obviously, the TSA has found a big enough noise source.

In particular, the difficulty with mm-wave interference is that it can induce noise directly onto the geometries of integrated circuits and thin-film devices. The only way to guard against the problem would be to heavily shield the chips in question. Maybe it is time for medical devices to start using radiation-hardened integrated circuits. Radiation hardened circuits are designed to withstand short and intense blasts of EMI, including high-frequency EMI sources.

Re:EMC compliance

[DanTheStone]

I did a little searching, and decided not to moderate on this article. Here's a news article saying they were adding millimeter-wave scanners at Salt Lake City, so the summary/title is correct. http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/50590050-79/tsa-scanner-airport-body.html.csp

Re:EMC compliance

[Anonymous Coward]

I did RF compliance and sensor design for two insulin pumps. An insulin pump is considered a Class 2 medical device, which means that it is an acceptable to stop delivering insulin and alert the user in case of a failure. The user would then rely on manual delivery until the fault cleared.

A Class 3 would be required to continue delivering therapy (and announce the error) in a single fault situation. This is reserved for devices where a manual fail-over isn't a safe option.

I would recommend not signing that

[Sycraft-fu]

I don't know if it is a real petition or not, but what I do know is it is a real SPAM list. Ever since signing it, they've been bombarding me with shit asking for money and their opt out doesn't seem to want to opt out.

I am more than a little annoyed.

Re:I would recommend not signing that

[Formorian]

Wish I had points to mod you up more. I've been bombarded with Ron Paul/Dudley Brown/etc after signing that crap. So annoying.

Re:The war on terror is over

[SJHillman]

The war on terror will never be over as long as the TSA is around. Radiation bombardment? Groping children? Sounds like Al-qaida has outsourced overseas.

Re:forced?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Ummm, go to any beach in Europe and knock yourself out.

We Americans are diseased in the head in many ways.

Re:new slogan

[jythie]

That can be pretty difficult to do with electronics. Any circuit board can act as an antenna, and (apparently) these mm machines sometimes also produce x-rays beyond what one would encounter in normal life, which is what fried the pump.

Re:new slogan

[Barbara, not Barbie]

If the insulin pump is that easy to break, surely some blame lies there as well?

We are talking about something that should be required to withstand basically a lot of punishment, because the owners life depends on it - if subjecting it to a small amount of radiation (and no matter how the TSA likes to get piled on here, their scanners do emit a small amount of radiation in the scheme of things) in the course of a pretty routine activity, then the pumps manufacturer needs to look to resolving that flaw with their equipment.

First, there was absolutely no need for her to pass through any sort of scanner, as is evidenced by her previous flights, when she produced the documentation and was given a pat-down search instead.

Second, the circuitry wasn't designed for this sort of radiation, since it's never encountered outside a lab - as even the summary makes clear.

Third, the scanners routinely emit a lot more radiation than the makers claim.

Re:new slogan

[SlippyToad]

Also, she's getting more radiation on the plane itself than from anything on the ground.

I guess completely ignoring the fact that she was passed through a scanner that emitted radiation escaped both you and the author of TFA.

Or, perhaps you just don't give a fuck.

I'm diabetic, and my wife is. The reason for an insulin pump is because self-monitored injections can no longer keep up with the endocrine system. This young girl is not using a pump for convenience, especially not one that costs $10k. She is using it because it is critical for her survival.

Downplaying the risks, and the obvious unknown of these body scanners which fuck if anyone knows whether or how they really work, just makes you look like the most incredible god-damn asshole on the planet.

Just thought I'd mention that. These body scanners are FUCKING SECURITY THEATER that are ADMITTED TO NOT WORK.

Scanners gotta go. I do not fly anymore and I will not fly anymore until they are gone.

Re:new slogan

[Lurker2288]

Type I diabetes is caused by the autoimmune destruction of the pancreatic islet cells which produce insulin. It has nothing to do with corn syrup or the FDA.

Re:new slogan

[SlippyToad]

FROM THE ARTICLE:

She says she was told to go through it anyway. "When someone in a position of authority tells you it is - you think that its right. So, I said, Are you sure I can go through with the pump? It's not going to hurt the pump? And she said no, no you're fine."

Are people just too fucking lazy to even read before they open their big mouths?

Re:new slogan

[element-o.p.]

Yes, you are correct: correlation != causation, and therefore, no, we don't know that the MW scanner killed her insulin pump. However, we can't test the theory because TSA, in their infinite wisdom, refuses to allow their machines to be tested.

As far as the "more radiation on the plane than in the scanner" hogwash, that is a more-or-less apples to apples comparison with the X-ray scanner -- not the MW scanner. First, what are the power levels at which the X-ray scanners and MW scanners operate? Are they comparable? I don't know, and I suspect neither does the commenter from the TFA. Therefore, that argument is invalid without more information. Second, I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is that X-rays have a lot more in common with cosmic rays (what you are exposed to in an airplane) than either of those forms of radiation have in common with microwaves (what she was actually exposed to). Therefore, saying that microwaves are safe for insulin pumps because the cosmic rays at altitude don't affect the insulin pump is a lot like saying UV-B is safe for skin because visible light doesn't cause either skin cancer or sunburn. They operate at different wavelengths, thus they have different effects.

Re:new slogan

[jamstar7]

It's not as simple as taking the current number of hijackings and bombings, dividing by the current number of flights, ignoring the fact that screening is currently in place (and has been since the 1970's), and thus "proving" that we don't need screening of any kind.

WHAT 'screening in the 70's? Hell, as late as 1968, you could walk onto the tarmac, board a commuter flight, and buy your ticket on the plane. This was going on during riots in major American cities, militant groups screaming armed revolution and having regular shootouts with the cops, and hijackings were common enough that a skit on a national comedy show had a guy come into an airliner cockpit waving a gun screaming "This plane is going to Chicago!", and when he's informed it's already going to Chicago, claims "I was on this flight last week, and we ended up in Havana!"

All that was done was, they started placing a couple armed air marshals on board the most hijacked flights. No screenings. No patdowns. Yeah, they xrayed your luggage, but that was about it. Hell, they'd even let you smoke during the flight.