Skin CANCER Facts

Summer is the best time for swimming, picnics, and fun. But it's also the best time to get bad sunburn or worse, a bad case of skin cancer. Sufficient sunlight helps your body make vitamin D but too much can kill you. Aside from premature aging, wrinkles and cataracts, long-term exposure to the sun's ultraviolet rays causes skin cells to grow unusually and build up into a tumor that can be cancerous. The most common types of skin cancers are basal cell and “squamous” cell cancers. Melanoma is less frequent but more deadly. This usually occurs in the fourth or fifth decade of life but 80 to 90 percent of sun-related damage that paves the way for melanoma that occurs before 18 years of age.