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In December, two senior officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Pre- vention published a short report in one of the American Medical Association's journals, asking the public to believe that sunbeds cause 3,234 emergency room vis- its per year in the United States – a figure that was promoted to news organizations everywhere. But 3,234 isn't a real number; it's a manu- factured number. And as you look closer and closer at the math used to create it, you have to wonder how this "research letter" (two pages, if you include the graphs) ever got published. This paper has the appearance of content designed to misrepresent the topic: • The raw data came from just 405 ER reports collected between 2003 and 2012 in 66 hospitals nationwide. That's less than 41 per year, which amounts to less than one emergency room visit per year per hospital related to sunbeds. • The raw data came from a database that doesn't even collect information about sunbeds – the CDC researchers had to mine through a subset of a public database to produce their own set of 405 reports. They did not release this subset database nor really report the details of how they created it. • The raw data in the same database suggest that "laundry baskets" were related to about seven times more injuries as compared to sunbeds. In fact, sunbeds would rank dead last in relative risk among the items actually listed in the database. • The raw data show that ER reports in 2012 declined more than three-fold from the number collected in 2003. That should have been the lead-point in the CDC report. Perhaps most significant: The report did not isolate tanning salons, but rather man- ufactured data from sunbeds used either "at home" or in a "public property/place." That's where it gets really interesting. If every sunbed in that "public property/ place" category was in a tanning sa- lon (which there is no way of knowing — many could easily be unmonitored sunbeds in apartment complexes or gyms) that translates into an ER injury rate of just 0.00000345, or just over three-ten- thousandths of one percent for all public sunbeds in 2012. But since "public property/place" is not just tanning salons, and in fact tanning salons may be the minority of sunbeds in that group, that means the ER injury rate at tanning salons would be somewhere between zero and three-ten-thousandths of one percent. But that's not how CDC or the media reported it. Perception sometimes trumps reality. We will all push to hold CDC accountable for this report. But on top of that it's clear that the professional suntan- ning industry must continue to improve its perception. As a life-long defender of moderate UV exposure, I look at this as a challenge for the real pros in the professional suntan- ning market to up our sunburn-preven- tion game. That's critical for our ability to improve public perception. We need to be defined by these successes one client at a time. Success stories can trump data in your community. FROM THE FRONT LINES 67 ❘ SMART TAN MAGAZINE ❘ JANUARY 2015 WWW.SMARTTAN.COM Did CDC Burn The Truth in ER-Sunbed Report? Joseph Levy is senior vice president of Smart Tan. Since 1992 Levy has been interviewed by every major broadcast network in North America and hundreds of print media sources as an expert in UV, indoor tanning and vitamin D research, particularly the politics behind the research. He is a lifetime member of the American Society for Photobiology and promotes sunburn prevention as a practical approach to sun care.