Emergency room injuries related to sunbed use in public and non-public settings have declined more than three-fold since 2003, according to a widely circulated report from the  U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Tuesday.

In fact, sunbed-related ER injuries in 2012 from sunbed use “in public property/place” totaled 1,260 — a number extrapolated by CDC from ER data compiled at 66 hospitals and projected by CDC onto the rest of the U.S. population.

If every sunbed in that category was in a tanning salon (which there is no way of knowing — many could easily be unmonitored sunbeds in apartment complexes and gyms) that translates into an ER injury rate of just 0.00000345 — or just over three-ten-thousandths of one percent for all public sunbeds in 2012.

But since “public property/place” is not just tanning salons — and in fact tanning salons may be the minority of sunbeds in that group —  that means the ER injury rate at tanning salons would be somewhere between zero and three-ten-thousandths of one percent.

But that’s not how CDC or the media reported it Tuesday.

“It seems clear from how widespread this report has been — and that the authors explicitly call for political action on tanning salons in their report that some sort of public relations effort was used to distort this data to harm the tanning industry,” International Smart Tan Network’s Joseph Levy said. “The data in this report showed a huge reduction in injuries in the past 10 years. That’s the only conclusion that the data were capable of illustrating.”

The report was not a peer-reviewed study. It was published simply as a two-page, non-peer-reviewed “letter” in the American Medical Association’s Internal Medicine journal.

According to the CDC:

• 79.5 percent of injuries were sunburns.
• 9.5 percent of injuries involved fainting.
• 5.6 percent of injuries involved lacerations.
• 5.8 percent of injuries were to the eye.

The authors publicized that 3,234 injuries occurred annually from their projections. Most reports downplayed that the data ranged from 6,487 injuries in 2003 to 1,957 total injuries in 2012. Only 64.4 percent of injuries were attributed to sunbeds in “public property/place”.

None of the data were based on actual cases — simply data extracted from ER medical records.

“Smart Tan will work with the American Suntanning Association to investigate this report and take action,” Levy said. “But professional tanning facilities in the Smart Tan family can take pride that this report should say that injuries are much less common today than they were 10 years ago, and that we are doing more and more to ensure a non-burning experience for all our clients.”

SmartTan.com news articles regularly report medical and scientific information to keep you abreast of current events related to UV light. This information is not intended to be used by any party to make unwarranted health claims to promote sunbed usage. Indoor tanning businesses are obligated to communicate a fair and balanced message to all clients about your products and services including the potential risks associated with indoor tanning. Contact your Smart Tan representative to find out more about what you can and can’t say in your tanning salon business.

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