Do you know your UVA from your UVB?

Hi Nina Our sunscreen says it also protects against ‘long ‘ UVA which I’ve not seen before. Is long UVA a big issue ?

Given that people tend to go abroad for sunny holidays i was curious as to what was the situation in the US – particularly given the possible problems of taking fluids etc through airports. The bottom line is that Which? should advise on the shortfall of US products for the benefit of the annual 4 million British visitors to the US.

Apparently the EU regulations, despite problems , is seen to be better than the US control. e.g. this was one study in 2009

” Also, the Food and Drug Administration requires sunscreens to be topical, which means that your skin won’t absorb them into the bloodstream. But last year, a CDC study found the common UVA blocker oxybenzone in the urine of 2,500 people who regularly used sunscreens. Another CDC study found that babies born to mothers whose urine contained significant amounts of one type of oxybenzone weighed noticeably more or less at birth than those in a control group. The highest concentrations of the chemical occurred in white women, who use more sunscreen.”

So moving forward to 2016 what is the situation there in the USA :

“Many products offer poor protection. This year, the group looked at more than 750 products and concluded that nearly 75 percent of them offered poor protection or had ingredients the group found “worrisome.” For example, oxybenzone is a sunscreen additive that the working group says is a hormone disrupter and allergen.

Sonya Lunder, a senior analyst for the Environmental Working Group, says it’s a good thing that the number of mineral-only products has doubled since 2007, rising from 17 percent of products to 34 percent in 2016. These sunscreens, which offer protection against both UVA and UVB, generally don’t contain harmful additives.”

It is worth looking at the site for all their tips
ewg.org/sunscreen/

Of particular relevance is this:
” British researcher Brian Diffey evaluated the UV protection of four U.S. sunscreens and four sold in Europe, each of which had an SPF value of 50 or 50+. He found that the U.S. sunscreens allowed, on average, three times more UVA rays to pass through to skin than European products, which included the modern UVA filters (Diffey 2015). ”

However the FDA are not totally toothless:
“It’s already clear that some European chemicals should not be admitted to the U.S. market. For instance, Merck has applied to FDA for permission to market a sunscreen ingredient called 4-MBC or Enzacamene, a UVB filter. Researchers have detected 4-MBC in European women’s breast milk and in wildlife (Krause 2012). These findings are troubling because laboratory tests suggest that 4-MBC disrupts the hormone system (Krause 2012). Hormone disruptors pose particular dangers to the fetus because small perturbations to hormone systems could cause lasting changes in the developing brain, thyroid and reproductive system. “

Apologies if I have missed it – but an important piece in the jigsaw seems to have been missed from the discussion. Companies make sunscreens to make money – not to prevent illness. And one of the ways that is an effective selling tool is to frighten the pants of people by only giving one half of the story.

So what is the other half of the story? Well, there is overwhelming evidence that many illnesses are related to latitude, for example, cancers and Type 1 diabetes since the synthesis of vitamin D, essential to health, decreases the further you go from the equator in either direction.

I will quote from the book “Doctoring Data” by Dr Malcolm Kendrick –

“Here are just two stand-out facts from a major study in the Annals of Epidemiology entitled ‘Vitamin D for Cancer Prevention’

Women with higher solar UVB exposure had only half the incidence of breast cancer as those with lower solar exposure.
Men with higher residential solar exposure had only half the incidence rate of fatal prostate cancer.

To put that in simple English, if you spend longer in the sun, you may be far less likely to die of breast and prostate cancer (and lots of other cancers as well, ….

But what about the increase risk of dying of skin cancer! I hear you cry. Well, what of it? Around 2000 people a year die of malignant melanoma in the UK each year ……

On the other hand, breast cancer kills around 20,000 a year, as does prostate cancer”

So these 2 cancers (breast and prostate) alone, I stress alone, kill 20 times the number of people as melanoma and that is not even considering the numerous other diseases linked to low vit D levels.

I am not suggesting that everyone should go out into the midday sun in Britain in the summer months without some protection – but the idea that it is safest to slap on layers of sun cream at all times of day and thus prevent the sun from providing vitamin D could, on balance, be far more damaging to health – even if it provides lots of profit for the manufacturers.

In ‘Which’ edition June 2016 (page 60) my wife and I struggled to make sense of the caution about sun exposure time, viz “The number relates to time…. However, the time starts as soon as you step into the sun and doesn’t get reset each time you reapply the sunscreen – it’s set for the day.” I wonder how many people understand that? We certainly didn’t and assumed that re-applying cream extended the period of protection i.e. regularly re-applying even a low SPF cream throughout the day would reset the clock and protect you all day.

It’s hard to understand the principle behind this. Could you explain it more simply for us?

You say that you do not think “once-a-day”, “eight-hour” claims should be made on sunscreen products in the UK, but you should check out Ultrasun’s claims on QVC. what worries me is that this claim is made alongside a picture of a mum with a young child.
“Ultrasun offer a range of high level sun protection products that work to shield you against UVA and UVB rays and are suitable for children and those with sensitive skin. One application is all that’s needed for all-day defence against harmful sun damage.”
I have bought the Ultrasun SPF50 for my husband who burns very easily, and he lathers it over his bald head but then slaps a cap over it. He also uses the plunge pool when on holiday.Now you suggest that that there may a considerable decrease in the SPF protection. I was thinking of getting some for my pregnant daughter who is about to go on holiday and very lax about sun screen. I shall save my money and advice her to go for Nivea and make her partner nag her accordingly.