DC Child Accident & Safety Blog

Included in the healthcare reform bill that President Obama signed into law recently is a new 10% tax on sunbeds that is hoped to deter young people from using the indoor tanning machines, reports USA Today’s Liz Szabo.

Used by about one in three 17-year-old girls in the country, these ultraviolet radiation-emitting beds actually pose grave dangers to human health, resulting in skin and eye cancer. According to Szabo, the tanning beds increase the risk of skin cancer by 75% for users under the age of 30.

In a USA Today article from July 2009, it was reported that “international cancer experts have moved tanning beds and other sources of ultraviolet radiation into the top cancer risk category, deeming them as deadly as arsenic and mustard gas.”

In addition to the new tax, the FDA is considering putting restrictions such as requiring teens to get parental consent before using the sunbeds. The FDA may eventually ban the use of tanning beds among teenagers.

Cancer treatment and management is no easy task for anyone, but it can be much more challenging for teenage patients, according to New York Times’ Roni Rabin. To begin with, detection of the disease is difficult for patients in this age group, because teenagers do not usually share with adults about their physical changes. Neither are the teenage patients inclined to seek help, as they are at a stage where independence is a landmark of growth. This often results in late detection of the disease and subsequently necessitates aggressive treatments and leads to lingering side effects.

Another difficulty with managing cancer for teenagers and young adults is the ongoing debate over whether these patients should receive treatment in pediatric hospitals or with adults in regular hospitals. The truth is there is no good fit for teenage patients: the types of cancers teenagers develop are often very different from those adults have. Also, the psychosocial support teenage patients need is not available from either the pediatric settings, where most of the population is comprised of toddlers and children, or regular hospitals, whose adult patients have decidedly different concerns in their struggles with cancer.

In light of the difficulty of treating and managing teenagers’ cancer, new cancer treatment programs are being tailored specifically for teenagers and young adults. The Knight Cancer Institute in Oregon, for example, instituted a program where pediatric and adult oncologists are both available for consultation.

Parents should report to their child's pediatrician any physical or behavioral changes they observe in teenagers. Symptoms as subtle as prolonged fatigue can be a warning sign for serious disease, like lymphoblastic leukemia.

New research from the Harvard School of Public Health shows that tobacco companies have been deliberately varying levels of menthol in their cigarettes, marketing cigarettes with lower levels of menthol to younger smokers and then increasing the level of menthol with the age of the target demographic. From the article:

One document from R.J. Reynolds noted that all three major menthol brands "built their franchise with YAS (younger adult smokers) ... using a low-menthol product strategy. However, as smokers acclimate to menthol, their demand for menthol increases over time."

In 1987, R.J. Reynolds marketed low-level menthol varieties to persuade consumers to switch from regular brands and to recruit new, young smokers, noting: "First-time smoker reaction is generally negative. ... Initial negatives can be alleviated with a low level of menthol."

This new research serves as a reminder that, despite famous regulations about where and how Joe Camel can be displayed, tobacco companies continue to market deadly products to very young people.

A new report in today's New England Journal of Medicine suggests that many people in the U.S. are needlessly exposed to dangerous radiation during medical tests, particularly CT scans. The problem is most clearly evident with respect to children. The report may be overestimating possible risks to adults, but there is a clear reason to think that an excess of these tests pose a public health risk to children.

The study points out that a minimum of 4 million CT scans are done on children per year, with over 62 million done on the American population as a whole. These large numbers are the result of the overwhelming popularity and rapid increase of use of CT scans since they were introduced. These numbers, in conjunction with studies showing that a large percentage of medical tests are completely unnecessary, suggest that many children are being given CT scans when they do not need them.

The risk of CT scans come from the "super X-rays" that the test uses. Children are more susceptible to radiation than adults and more likely to develop cancer because of it. But it is important to remember that the risk to any one particular individual is slight. It is only when we look at large populations that a problem starts to emerge. It is also important to remember that the report is pointing to a potential problem rather than an actual one: the report predicts that CT scans will be tied to a significant percentage of cancer cases. This means that the new report gives us an opportunity to head off a public health problem before it becomes truly dangerous. It also highlights one of the possible downsides of rampant overuse of medical tests.

The New England Journal of Medicine provides the first few lines of the report here: Computed Tomography--An Increasing Source of Radiation Exposure.