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24 thoughts on “America’s teen sunburn crisis”

  1. skeptonomist

    The most striking thing about this is the almost total lack of year-to-year variation in the measures, or any other indication of the error of the measurements. There is no way that one can tell from a diagram like this whether the slight increases have any significance at all. Probably not , but to what level of confidence could one say that there is no increase?

    2. treeeetop57

      I’m quite certain the 9% “increase” among African-Americans is not significant. The line looks like 15% plus or minus a percentage point.

      1. Kevin Drum Post author

        If you're curious, the standard errors are 3, 5, 5, 10 percentage points for white, Black, Hispanic, and Asian respectively. So they're all statistically significant, though not by much.

        But I wasn't really serious about this in the first place....

  2. Justin

    The sunscreen industry thanks you. I didn’t use much sunscreen as a kid and so now that I’m older the Actinic keratosis is in full swing on my forehead. Being of Irish and German heritage you can imagine the sunburn risk was always high. Still, even now I go out and get a nice tan every year. The pool is still open (though cold here in Michigan today).

    As we all try to process the insanity of our political systems here and around the world, I am less inclined to support policy to address all these crises. Experts are always afraid of some new threat and, well, I’m just not feeling it anymore. There is no crisis worth fixing. We’re all gonna die someday of some thing. Carpe diem.

    1. DButch

      I'm Scots/Norman/English/Irish, with some Picts"in the woodpile" based on skull shapes. I was born and grew up in Samoa, Trinidad, Maui, and Oahu. Even a British isles and Frenchified Viking (Normans - North Men) can get a fine tan in 18 years on tropical and subtropical islands.

      Until I moved to Cambridge MA for college and lost it all in about 4-6 weeks.

      Oh, and BTW, a French kinglet in Northern France supposedly invited Vikings to settle in to (I think, to quell the Gauls). If you have a problem whose solution is: "Get a lot of Vikings!". You have a really bad problem.

  3. lancc

    In the old days, kids went out and got a peeling sunburn. Sometimes they did this every year. The fact that only 14% or so are reporting it nowadays suggests that there has been improvement over the past few decades.

    We might consider that something more than twenty thousand Americans die from melanoma and squamous cell carcinoma each year, largely due to sun exposure in their youth. This is about one-sixth of the yearly number of new cases that are caught and excised.

    1. iamr4man

      My sister was recently diagnosed with melanoma. She was having lunch with a friend who happens to be a dermatologist. She crossed her leg and noticed, for the first time, a brown spot. She pointed to it and said “what do you think?” to her friend. Her friend told her she didn’t like it and to come to her office the next day. It was pretty serious, but the second biopsy appears to have gotten it all and sentinel lymph node biopsy indicated it hasn’t spread to her lymph nodes. If not for that lunch, who knows what would have happened.
      In 1996 she had tickets to go to Rome with her two children. The flight would have meant flying from LA to New York and changing planes there. She decided it was going to be a struggle with two kids and found a non stop flight which was much more expensive but more convenient. So she changed flights and thus wasn’t on TWA flight 800 which crashed with no survivors.
      So she’s had a couple of pretty frightening close calls.

      2. DButch

        I was operated on back in the late 80s for an incredibly tiny melanoma between my big toe and index toe(?) on my left foot - deep down on the lower web between the toes where the sun don't shine even there. A place that even living in the tropics gets rarely any sun.

        My wife spotted it, didn't like the look, had me have our doctor check, and it was no bigger that the tip of a very well sharpened pencil. But he thought it was distinct from the (very) pale flesh between my toes and given my tropical exposure, he referred me to a cancer specialist who asked me (inadvisably) what my wife and I were doing that she even noticed it.

        I (seeing an opportunity) started to get a big and dirty grin - and he immediately said: (Right, I probably don't need any detail!" Then took a sample that required his smallest skin punch. About a week later, he called and said: "We need to operate next week!" He explained that it was so tiny that it would normally have not been even seen in a normal skin check and was the tiniest melanoma recorded when he checked with colleagues.

        They also almost operated on the wrong foot - fortunately my wife was also there at the prep after I was put under and realized that they had marked up the wrong foot and told them to look at the original diagnosis documents (which she had brought along) and told them to call the cancer specialist office to confirm. Good thing - my left foot looked like I had been attacked by a sharp melon baller AND I had nice patch of skin taken out of my right thigh as a graft. Not fun - and having to do it again - just no...

        1. Larry Jones

          They also almost operated on the wrong foot...

          Chiming in here just to say that when I had cataract surgery I went through a fairly lengthy pre-surgery meeting for eye #2 before it came out that they were preparing to work on the wrong eye. I was the one who saw the impending mistake and offered the correction. Anecdotally it seems to me there are quite a lot of wrong-foot, wrong-eye, wrong arm errors in the world of Big Medicine, and I wonder how many of them end up with someone losing an eye or a foot.

          2. steverinoCT

            There was the guy who had the wrong lower limb amputated. After discovering the error, he had to of course go back for surgery to get the proper limb removed. He tried to sue, but the case was dismissed: he didn't have a leg to stand on. (ba-dum-dum)

    2. rick_jones

      The 14% is merely by how much reports of sunburn have increased among white teens. To need to look at the y-axis for the overall figures.

  4. dmcantor

    When I was a child, up to and including my teens and beyond, sunscreen didn't exist. The SPF scale had not been invented. There were some after-burn lotions, but they didn't really work.

    I got many serious sunburns every summer. Fair skin, but I loved to be outside. I have just learned to accept a much-increased skin cancer risk. I'm 72 now, and so far so good.

    I took a trip to the South Pacific at age 31. By that time the SPF scale did exist, but the very best products were SPF 4. I got 2nd degree sunburn on the tops of my feet, which definitely put a crimp in my vacation.

    I am now religious about putting on sunscreen whenever I am in the sun for more than a few minutes. Probably shutting the barn door after the horses have escapted.

  7. ScentOfViolets

    Somebody put together a great article asking if graduating high school seniors are getting younger. From the photographic evidence, dayyum, yes. Some of those kids from back in the day look as if they were zeroing in on the big three-oh. But as mentioned above, we're not so much younger as we are healthier, amen. No smoking. Better food choices. Sun screen. Etc. Bit by tiny bit the world is becoming a better place.

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