In the 11th hour of Mayor Bloomberg’s tenure, he’s launched a new campaign against indoor tanning that will slam dozens of small businesses, hundreds of jobs and the rights of New Yorkers to make health-care decisions for themselves.
On Monday, the city’s Department of Health, which will oversee the mayor’s stepped-up anti-tanning campaign, held hearings on new rules for the salons.
I and my colleagues in the business testified there and offered a better idea: With mere weeks left in his term, why doesn’t Bloomberg let the next administration work with the industry to create workable regulations all can agree on?
As matters stand, the indoor-tanning industry already willingly complies with many of the regulations the administration is seeking, which were put in place long before the mayor proposed them.
Our salons are licensed and have professionally trained staffs. We enforce the “teen tan ban” and have an abundance of state and federally mandated warnings we provide to our customers.
While we are a business, we also make it our mission to do right by our customers.
Our first rule is “Don’t burn.”
We skin-type customers and advise them to use moderate exposure to match their type. In fact, our most common arguments are with customers who want more exposure than we’d recommend. So the question is why more rules — and why now? Why put something in place so late and leave the next administration to implement it without any say?
The scare tactics and “facts” the Department of Health is using to back-up its calls for more regulation and oversight are based upon cherry-picked portions of studies to support its claims and misleading pieces of information.
For example, if city officials are going to say that “all UV exposure is dangerous” and “there is no such thing as a safe tan,” then they are leaving behind the preponderance of scientific research, not to mention all of human history. Sunlight — a major source of UV light — is also the source of all life on the planet. It drives the entire food chain. Literally, sun is life: UV produces vitamin D and other photo-products that are essential to human health. No UV, no humans. Period.
The chief reason the Bloomberg folks give for why additional regulations are needed is there’s a supposed 75 percent increase in melanoma risk among those who tan before age 30.
But that figure hides an obvious misrepresentation of the data. The underlying studies show that almost all of the 75 percent jump in risk in the seven studies selected to produce that claim was associated not with commercial tanning salons like ours, but with unsupervised home units and “phototherapy” used by dermatologists.
And, although phototherapy was associated with the highest risk, it is explicitly exempted from the proposed regulations.
How does that make sense?
Skin cancer is a legitimate concern, but well over 99 percent of cases are treatable. And if it’s such an overarching concern, then New York should be banning public parks, beaches and sporting events, too. Of course, it won’t — because each is important to the vitality and economy of our city, just as our small businesses are.
Let’s end this anti-tanning campaign built on false information and let it be in the hands of Mayor Bloomberg’s successor. Give us — salon owners with decades of knowledge and experience — the opportunity to collaborate with the Department of Health and the new administration to create a program that Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio can be proud to call his own and that will allow adults to make informed decisions about indoor tanning based on real facts.
Jan Meshon runs City Sun Tanning, which, along with Beach Bum Tanning and Portofino Sun Centers, is leading efforts to forestall the city’s new rules for tanning salons.