BETHESDA, MD — The U.S. military could do more to protect service members from skin cancer, according to a recent article.
The report in Military Medicine pointed out that, even though skin cancer rates have been burgeoning among civilians in the United States for decades, military personnel are at even greater risk. 1
“As with so many aspects of health, simple preventive measures made early on can dramatically improve long-term health outcomes,” wrote authors Alexandra Rosenberg, MD, of Walter Reed National Military Medicine Center and Sunghun Cho, MD, of the Uniformed Services University, both in Bethesda, MD. “Ample research has demonstrated that ultraviolet protection reduces skin damage and cancer rates.”
The article noted that current barriers to service members’ use of sun protection isn’t fully understand, but recommended several measures. Among those are:
- Early education and intervention to reduce skin cancer risk and promote sun-protective strategies.
- Improving sun protection offered by uniform items, such as increasing the availability of the sun hat, using eye protection with tinted inserts and testing and publicizing the ultraviolet protection level of uniform items.
- Increasing sunscreen access for military personnel by issuing them small portable packets or bottles of sunscreen to carry on their person, incorporating small packets of sunscreen in MREs and issuing sunscreen to commands to distribute before field exercises.
- Having unit and medical leadership encourage the use of sunscreen and sun-protective strategies when possible; leadership engagement is critical to overcoming current behavioral barriers to change.
- Reducing sun exposure during training by encouraging service members to seek shade and avoiding outdoor training in the middle of the day.
“Sun protection strategies face many limitations within the current military context,” Rosenberg and Cho advised. “Commanders and soldiers are already overburdened with a myriad of demands on their time. The operational tempo and the hazards of deployment often present far more acute threats than the long-term implications of sun damage.”
One issue is that the damage takes a long time to appear, they noted, adding, “Apart from the immediate unpleasantness of a sunburn, the true cost of chronic sun damage generally takes years or decades to fully manifest. Further research is needed to fill the knowledge gap about barriers to the adequate use of sun protection in the military.”
The authors wrote, “Our patients at Walter Reed tell us they wish they had known the cost of the chronic sun damage they experienced in the military and had done more to prevent it. Army wide efforts to improve education about and access to UV protective strategies could go a long way toward improving these outcomes.”
- Rosenberg A, Cho S. We Can Do Better at Protecting Our Service Members From Skin Cancer. Mil Med. 2022 Jul 5:usac198. doi: 10.1093/milmed/usac198. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35789273.
