Sink or Swim

Being a guy who never really cares about anything much, I haven’t really taken that much precaution in other things since lately. I didn’t know that there had been a research conducted by some specialists about the increase of risk in skin cancer due to the use of excess sunscreen.

Yup that’s right, the excessive use of sunscreen. Apparently the countries where sunscreen have been heavily promoted are statistically the ones that have higher numbers of skin cancer patients. More than a decade ago, studies have shown that Professor Johan Moan of the Norwegian Cancer Institute found that the yearly incidence of melanoma in Norway had increased by 350% for men and by 440% for women during the period 1957 to 1984.

In an estimation, an amout of 32,000 heads suffering from skin cancer can produce a rate of about 6,500 fatal cases via estimation. This is a huge number and what I find particularly interesting here is the fact that this has nothing to do with the ozone depletion. Studies show that at the time the numbers have increased greatly, no drastic change from the ozone have taken place that could cause this problem.

Sunscreen might have done all this. The chemicals that are within the sunscreen we use are also responsible for the depression of the immune system — which is supposed to help us regulate our bodies to protect ourselves from the sun. Not only that, a driven fact is also staying out too much in the sun because of the use of sunscreen and the thought that since nobody’s getting any darker means they’re safe from having their bodies toasted by the UV rays.

Of course, all of which have been researched upon by specialists, I think most of them make sense. Then again, its not like I’m going to stop using the sunscreen but perhaps stay a decent amount of time under the sun.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.