June 19, 2007
Stay out of the sun!
A childhood sunburn isn't the worst thing that could happen to the kids, right? Well, according to a skin doc, it could be.
Dr. Michael L. Ramsey, a dermatologist at the Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa., coaches his son’s Little League team these summery days when he’s not removing patients’ skin cancers.
“The last thing I want is to someday see one of my baseball players as a patient,” he remarked recently in The Skin Cancer Foundation Journal.
And so, while encouraging the players to do their best on the field, he also pays close attention to their need to protect themselves from the sun’s skin-damaging ultraviolet rays. For he knows all too well that more than 90 percent of all skin cancers are caused by sun exposure; that the risk for a future skin cancer doubles with five or more sunburns; and that while the jury is still out, the risk of future melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, may well be increased by even one blistering sunburn in childhood.
Moreover, while children may find it hard to imagine ever being old (over 50), repeated sun exposure also ages the skin, causing premature wrinkling and a mottled, leathery hide that resembles an elephant’s. It may also be hard to impress children with the possibility of cumulative sun damage to their eyes, like cataracts.
... A child’s skin is especially vulnerable to the damaging effects of ultraviolet radiation. Most children will have had nearly a quarter of their lifetime exposure to this radiation by age 18, and the resulting damage is compounded repeatedly by subsequent exposure.
The only factoid in this article that sends my Bull-o-meter into the red is in that last 'graph. It's shocking that a kid gets almost 25 percent of his lifetime dosage of radiation by 18.
Except that if the kid lives to be about 72 -- not too far from the statistical mean on the actuarial charts -- 18 is one-quarter through the game, making the stat a rather big Duh!
Posted by Mike Lief at June 19, 2007 07:56 AM
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