TSA Asks Passengers "To Use Some Common Sense"

Doctors report a one-month-old baby who was accidentally put through an X-ray machine at Los Angeles International Airport this weekend will be just fine, and that he did not receive a dangerous dose of radiation.

The Los Angeles Times reports a 56-year-old woman placed her grandson in the scanner Saturday morning. TSA workers did not see the unnamed woman put the baby on the belt, but a worker pulled the bin out of the machine when he noticed the outline of a baby on the machine's monitor.

Officials say the woman spoke Spanish, and apparently did not understand English. She initially resisted efforts by airport staff to have her grandson taken to a local hospital for examination -- security officials called the paramedics anyway. After an examination, the woman and her grandson were allowed to board a flight to Mexico City.

The incident, while unusual, is not unprecedented. Paul Haney, deputy executive director of airports and security for the city's airport agency, said an infant in a car seat went through an X-ray scanner at LAX in 1988.

"Since then LAX has served more than 1 billion travelers without an incident of this type," he told the Associated Press.

Officials are questioning whether the TSA has enough screeners at checkpoints to catch similar errors.

"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, CO and president of the American College of Radiology. "Human beings weren't meant to go through those things."

Borgstede says the infant was subjected to the same dose of radiation in the machine, that he would naturally receive from cosmic rays in a day.

"The screeners are still reporting that they're being pushed," said retired FAA security agent Brian Sullivan. "If a baby can get through, what the hell else can get through?"

The TSA says its workers can't monitor everything passengers place on the belt -- and notes there are signs posted at ticket counters and near checkpoints, in both English and Spanish, warning people to place all metal objects into bins for x-ray surveillance.

"There's an obligation on the traveler to use some common sense," said Larry Fetters, the TSA's federal security director at LAX. "If they don't understand, they should ask somebody. If they ask us, we are generally able to find someone who speaks that language and assist them."

FMI: www.tsa.gov, www.lawa.org