Guest Editorial The new British Medical Ultrasound Society Guidelines for the safe use of diagnostic ultrasound equipment

Diagnostic ultrasound has an excellent safety record, with no evidence to date for harm arising from human exposure. It is, however, still the responsibility of the person carrying out the ultrasound examination to conduct it in a safe manner. This entails drawing on a good knowledge of the machine settings and their effect on potential bio-effects to control the output of the scanner. Most international pro-fessional ultrasound societies regard the giving of guidance for the continued safe use of diagnostic ultrasound to be of sufficiently great importance to have established their own safety committees, giving them the remit of providing advice to the society’s membership on this topic. While most of these committees have drawn up their own separate clinical safety statements,1–5 the content of these is, unsur-prisingly, generally similar. Few societies, however, hav