Moles and Skin Cancer

It is very important when you have moles on your body, to go to your family doctor and ask him or her to examine your entire body, from head to toe. Specially the back side because you cannot see it.  Here some pictures showing the differences between moles and skin cancer. 

Cancer and Tanning beds

Health minister touts banning minors from using tanning beds

 

Skin cancer deaths have been rising since 1986

 

BY JAMIE KOMARNICKI, CALGARY HERALD MAY 29, 2014

 

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Becky Lynn, who first used a tanning bed at age 16, was 26 when she found out she had melanoma, considered the deadliest form of skin cancer. She is urging to provincial government to move ahead as quickly as possible with legislation banning anyone under the age of 18 from using tanning beds.

Photograph by: Gavin Young , Calgary Herald

Health Minister Fred Horne says it’s time for the province to ban people under 18 from using tanning beds — a legislative move intended to protect youth from the growing risk of deadly skin cancer.

The provincial government is drafting legislation that Horne expects will come forward during the fall session.

While Horne said the bill hasn’t been finalized, “quite clearly, the ban on the use of tanning facilities by those under 18 is the way to go.

“The evidence is clear that exposure to tanning dramatically increases the risk of skin cancer,” Horne said on Wednesday.

“My view is it needs to be a ban on access to tanning (facilities) for people under the age of 18. I don’t think any measure short of that is going to be effective and provide the level of protection that we need.”

In the past, Horne has stayed mum on which way the government was leaning in drafting the legislation, including whether it preferred options such as parental consent for minors to use tanning equipment over a ban.

Alberta and Saskatchewan are the only two provinces that don’t regulate how youth access indoor tanning equipment.

Horne’s comments come as the Canadian Cancer Society released a report Wednesday that showed the number of people dying from melanoma, considered the deadliest form of skin cancer, has been on the rise since 1986, even as the death rate for other types of cancer, including stomach, prostate and breast, went down.

The rates are a concern considering ultraviolet radiation from overexposure to sun and sources including indoor tanning beds cause the majority of melanoma cases, and can therefore be prevented, said Evie Espheter, public policy analyst with the cancer society.

“We know that trends are increasing and they’re increasing at a really significant rate,” said Espheter.

“I think people are not registering the message. We’ve talked about sun safety, covering up, wearing sunscreen, etc. We’re seeing that message is not resonating as it should.”

The Canadian Cancer Society has been pushing for the Alberta to ban tanning beds for people under 18, saying parental consent legislation sends the wrong message to youth.

“Education is important, but it needs to be coupled with strong legislation that is gold-standard legislation,” Espheter said, adding that the society “applauds” Horne’s comments he’s planning to enact the ban.

Skin cancer is the most common cancer in Canada. Roughly 570 Albertans are expected to be diagnosed this year with the disease. Melanoma is one of the most common forms of cancer for young people between 15 and 29.

According to the Canadian Cancer Society report, people who use tanning beds before they turn 35 increase their risk of melanoma by 59 per cent.

Further, one in three 17-year-old girls in Alberta have used tanning beds.

Becky Lynn was 16 when she went to her first tanning salon on the advice of a friend’s mother as she was getting ready for a spring break holiday.

She used the beds regularly for the next decade — until she was diagnosed with stage 1 melanoma.

A surgery removed a fist-sized piece of her thigh along with the tumour.

Now a 46-year-old mother of three girls, Lynn said it’s disheartening to see the message isn’t getting through about the risks of melanoma.

She said she wants to see the Alberta government move forward with a ban as soon as possible.

“Every prom season, every spring-break season, we have countless number of young people, especially girls and women, like me, who are setting themselves up for risks they don’t even realize,” said Lynn.

“The only way to get there is by changing the regulation.”

Steven Gilroy of the Joint Canadian Tanning Association said the group has no plans to lobby against teenager restrictions.

But he urged the government to also consider enacting a ban on self-serve tanning, saying equipment should only be run by certified and trained operators.

“If you put a ban on under 18 and you have nobody supervising the equipment, you can’t control who tans in it,” said Gilroy.

jkomarnicki@calgaryherald.com

The EWG: Reading the ingredients list before buying a skin care product for you or your children

Healthy Home Tips: Tip 1 - Know the ingredients in your personal care products

Better products are truthful in their marketing claims and free of potentially worrisome ingredients. Some products might make claims like "gentle" or "natural," but since the government does not require safety testing, personal care product manufacturers can use almost any chemical they want, regardless of risks.

How to read a label
Every personal care product must list its ingredients. Here's how to navigate the label:

• Start at the end, with preservatives. Avoid:
  • Words ending in "paraben"
  • DMDM hydantoin
  • Imidazolidinyl urea
  • Methylchloroisothiazolinone
  • Methylisothiazolinone
  • Triclosan
  • Triclocarban
  • Triethanolamine (or "TEA")
     
• Check the beginning of the ingredients lists, where soaps, surfactants, and lubricants show up. Try to avoid ingredients that start with "PEG" or have an "-eth" in the middle (e.g., sodium laureth sulfate).
   
• Read the ingredients in the middle. Look for these words: "FRAGRANCE," "FD&C," or "D&C."
  
  

For grown-ups
Many parents pay more attention to their kids' environmental health than their own, but adult bodies can be affected by toxic chemicals, too. EWG's Safer Shopping List has common-sense tips to reduce everyone's exposures. For instance, buy fragrance-free, skip the nail polish and use fewer products.

Just for kids
Extra caution is in order for kids because, pound for pound, they are exposed to more contaminants in everyday products than adults. Their immature metabolism and organ systems are typically less capable of fending off chemical assaults. Even subtle damage to young bodies can lead to disease later in life.

Follow EWG's top five tips for kids:

• Use fewer products and use them less often.
• Don't trust ad hype. Check ingredients.
• Buy fragrance-free products.
• Avoid the use of baby powder.
• Always avoid EWG's top six chemicals of concern for kids:
  • 2-Bromo-2-Nitropropane-1,3 Diol
  • BHA
  • Boric acid and sodium borate
  • DMDM Hydantoin
  • Oxybenzone
  • Triclosan

José Antonio Bowen- Teaching Naked: E-communications and Guidelines

I am sharing this Social Media resource from the web http://teachingnaked.com/e-communication-and-guidelines/. I found it clear and easy to apply in the learning environment.

E-communications and Guidelines

E-communication Guidelines

Here are some easy ways to get students to pay attention to your missives:

• Start with a policy (see below): Decide how you will communicate and how often. Put this policy in the syllabus.

• Be consistent: Post on a regular basis. If there is a Twitter or Facebook group, decide if participation is mandatory and keep up with your own participation.

• Be dependable: Deliver on time! If you say the paper topics will be posted at 10am, students will start checking at 9:45 and will hit “refresh” every 6 seconds.  Post any delay by 10am.

• Don’t bombard: Limit communications to one a day.

• Be brief: You can include a link with more details. Twitter has a limit of 140 characters so it enforces brevity. (Both text and Twitter make it easy to embed a web link.)

• Be transparent: Tell everyone before you tell individual students. If you tell a student in the hall that you have decided to make the test a take home, they will tweet this to everyone; it is better coming directly from you.

• Use the right channel: Some forms of e-communication are more passive and less urgent. You can post a news story as your Facebook status, but if you want to remind students where the exam is, use a more active communication (like tweets, email or text).

• Archive: You should keep a record of every message (and the initial channel used) and keep this log posted either in a blog or in an LMS.

Developing an E-Communication Policy

A clear e-communication plan for the semester can stimulate your community of learners and make you more available to help your students.

• Establish in the syllabus how you will communicate. This should include your maximum e-mail response time and if you accept chat, Skype, Facebook friend requests or other networks. How to contact you is vastly more important to most students than your office hours.

• Limit the forms of communication. You probably do not need to do both Facebook chat and Skype. Don’t try to do everything at once. Ask students for casual feedback after class, but stick to your plan for a while before you try different or multiple channels at once. Do not randomly change your mode of communication.

• Create a schedule for yourself, follow through for an entire semester and then re-evaluate. When is the best time or the best day of the week to announce new assignments or provide your feedback on the last test?

• Do not mix the personal and the professional.

• It is fine, and even useful, to use multiple methods of communication as long as you are clear and consistent. You might, for example, let students know that e-mail is used for announcements and information about the readings, but that you will Tweet study questions. You could just as easily reverse this, but be clear and consistent. Students are used to filtering (i.e. blocking) certain stimuli so it is essential to let students know that information coming on their phone can affect their grade.

Template:

The best way to contact me is: ________________ (email, FB, Google+, LinkedIn)

I will respond to e-mail (or FB chat, messages etc.) within _____ hours,

except on ___ or between ________ (9pm and 9am etc.)

I also accept chat, Skype, Facebook friend requests or other networks.

I do/do not accept friend requests on Facebook, but I appreciate your connections on LinkedIn etc.

Needle-free vaccine!!!

I read this article in Ted Talks by Mark Kendall:: One hundred sixty years after the invention of the needle and syringe, we’re still using them to deliver vaccines; it’s time to evolve. Biomedical engineer Mark Kendall demos the Nanopatch, a one-centimeter-by-one-centimeter square vaccine that can be applied painlessly to the skin. He shows how this tiny piece of silicon can overcome four major shortcomings of the modern needle and syringe, at a fraction of the cost. Here the link to watch the talk.

http://on.ted.com/Nanopatch

Gentleness with yourself.

Be gentle with yourself.

Greetings from Pema

Here's a message from Pema just to all of you on her Facebook page.

Fear and Fearlessness

Maria Cesa has shared a video with you on YouTube Pema Chödrön: Fear and Fearlessness by Sounds True Free Weekly Wisdom. Visit http://www.soundstrue.com/weeklywisdom/?agmepisode=2775&wwepisode=2778&pepisode=2762 Fear and Fearlessness: http://www.soundstrue.com/shop/SelectProd.do?prodId=1158 Pema Chödrön describes a liberating way to relate to our fears: not as something to try to get rid of or cast out, but as something we became very intimate with. In so doing, she explains, we come to find that the journey of knowing fear is in fact the journey of courage. From this wisdom, we learn to embrace the fullness of our experience in life.