…WHAT IF YOUR job were to find a gun…?

Or a tumor? Both baggage screeners at airports and radiologists at hospitals spend the bulk of their time looking for things they rarely see. In the case of radiologists, routine mammograms reveal tumors only 0.3 percent of the time. In other words, 99.7 percent of the time, they won’t find what they’re looking for. Guns are even rarer. In 2004, according to the Transportation Security Administration, 650 million passengers traveled in the United States by air. But screeners found only 598 firearms. That’s roughly one gun for every million passengers — literally, one-in-a-million odds.

Both occupations, not surprisingly, have considerable error rates. Several studies suggest the “miss” rate for radiologists hovers in the 30 percent range. Depending on the type of cancer involved, though, the error rate can be much higher. In one especially frightning study, doctors at the Mayo Clinic went back and checked the previous “normal” chest X-rays of patients who subsequently developed lung cancer. What they found was horrifying: up to 90 percent of the tumors were visible in the previous X-rays. Not only that, the researchers noted, the cancers were visible “for months or even years.” The radiologists had simply missed them.

As for the nation’s fifty-thousand airport screeners, the federal government won’t reveal how often they make mistakes. But a test in 2002 indicated that they missed about one in four guns. During a similar test two years later at Newark’s airport, the failure rate was nearly identical: 25 percent. More recently, 60 percent of bomb materials and explosives hidden in carry-on items by undercover agents from the TSA were missed in 2006 by screeners at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. At Los Angeles International Airport, the results were even worse: screeners missed 75 percent of bomb materials.

And keep in mind, these are trained professionals dealing with life-or-death issues. Joseph T. Hallinan, “We Look but Don’t Always See,” Why We Make Mistakes, 23-24

THOUGHT: What happens when radiologists don’t find tumors and airport screeners don’t find weapons? People die. But what happens when Christians aren’t watching for, or don’t locate, false doctrines that are secretly smuggled into the local body of Christ? Give it some thought.

“And this occurred because of false brethren secretly brought in (who came in by stealth to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage).” Galatians 2:4; cf. Matthew 7:15-20

Mike Benson