Surgeon General Issues UV Report
The U.S. Acting Surgeon General on Tuesday issued “A Call to Action to Prevent Skin Cancer” — a 112-page report that specifically targets reducing sunbed usage as one of its action points.
The American Academy of Dermatology Association has been lobbying the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Surgeon General’s office for more than five years to encourage the Surgeon General to issue a report on indoor tanning. Last July, Dr. Boris Lushniak, a dermatologist, became acting surgeon general. Within three weeks he posted in the U.S. Federal Register that he was collecting information for such a report. Tuesday’s publication was a culmination of that process.
The report and the subsequent marketing of it are attempting to make sun exposure appear as dangerous as smoking — a ludicrous assertion qualitatively and quantitatively.
The World Health Organization says those who use sunbeds increase their risk of melanoma 15 percent — a number based on survey studies they called “limited” and which a 2014 review highlighted by CDC characterized as “poor to mediocre.” In contrast smokers increase their risk of lung cancer 2,500 percent and cigarette smoke is unnatural and unquestioned as the cause of disease, according to the US Surgeon General’s Report on Tobacco published this year.
“The Acting Surgeon General — a dermatologist — is trivializing an important subject by overstating the role of sunbeds in a cancer that, according to his own report, is increasing fastest in older men who do not frequent sunbed salons and whose UV exposure patterns are not actually known,” Smart Tan Vice President Joseph Levy said.
At a time when public health groups are advocating regular, non-burning sun exposure, this report should be focusing on sunburn prevention for people of all ages and men in particular. Smart Tan, American Suntanning Association and our groups’ members will continue to promote sunburn prevention and a responsible, balanced message.”
Smart Tan is working with American Suntanning Association to evaluate the report, which does acknowledge that there are benefits to some UV exposure, but also attempts to characterize the amount of UV people receive from sunbeds as excessive based on material we dispute.
The Report has a stated goal to reduce sunbed usage, referencing a University of California-San Francisco paper authored by a graduate student earlier this year which attempts to assert that sunbeds cause 400,000 cases of skin cancer annually.
That paper attempts to extrapolate that people who said they “ever had” one sunbed session — based on self-administered surveys without reliably confirming or accounting for other sun behavior or genetic factors — can be used to project how many people will get skin cancer based on the author’s own creation of what are called “Population Proportional Attributable Risk” (PPAR) multipliers — a daisy-chained projection based on no real collection of reliable information.
