Most people would love a nice healthy tan but how far would they go to get one? Would you be willing risk cancer and death all to look a little more bronzed and a little less pale? According to experts that’s exactly what regular users of sunbeds are doing every day and the potential risk of malignant melanoma grows with every exposure to the devices. Is it really worth it?
According to a study conducted a few years ago as many as 90% of sunbeds emit double the European limit of radiation and as such expose their users to vastly more damaging doses than is safe. That’s a meagre 10% of sunbeds which actually complied with safety limits and emitted around 0.3 watts of ultraviolet radiation; the rest emitted over 0.6 watts.
The worrying thing is that most people aren’t aware of the risk because the establishments which offer the sunbed services simply aren’t warning people. This means that people could be exposing themselves to potentially carcinogenic levels of UV radiation without realising that they are.
Sunbeds are supposed to have been regulated since 2009 and have been required to have a maximum output since then. The fact that we’ve been told that this occurred and it clearly hasn’t is extremely damaging to the credibility of the institutions which were supposed to be making these changes. The prevailing advice from experts is that using a sunbed in general simply isn’t worth the risk to your health and ultimately your life, even more so if they’re pumping out more damaging radiation than they should be.
The spokesperson for the Sunbed Association has claimed that the results are totally out of date and if the study were to be repeated the findings would be very different. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen but perhaps in the next few years we’ll see a repeat study and know more from that.
What are your views on the use of sunbeds? Worth the risk or a one way ticket to cancer?
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