Letter to the Editor – 'Peeping Tom' and public safety

The mixed reactions stirred by MCIA general manager Adelberto Yap's plan to install "Peeping Tom" scanners were quite amusing, exaggerated. The issue involved here is public safety. Between life and death, between recognition of threats in the person of a potential terrorist boarding a plane with the riding public, and survival.

In the practice of modern medicine high technology makes it possible to see the minutest detail of inside body parts in the diagnosis of serious diseases. Early detection means saving a life. What makes cancer curable today is because of early detection through high tech machines: CT scans, MRI, etc.

Terrorism is like cancer, it kills. Terrorists kill, themselves and others, if not found early enough.

What is the price? Nothing! A person's private parts are not necessarily the most interesting objects to see. What is there in the private parts that are not already known to science, the arts, the imagination, the Internet? Will an airport scan diminish one's private parts if, in passing, they are visualized in the process of ensuring airport safety?

If a patient who comes to the doctor's office is willing to bare all, allows the physician to touch, insert and cut, what makes it hard for a passenger to go through a scanner so that he can be sure he, and the other passengers, will reach their destination safely?

The human private parts have never changed in form and substance since time began. I am sure, the scanner technician will not be interested to find how new changes might have evolved.

Let's have the "Peeping Tom," and find out who are the malicious among us. Dr. Aguido A. Magdadaro
Talisay City