Time to tighten rules on tanning beds, skin doctors say

It's hard to fathom, but tanning beds are in the same medical device category as tongue depressors, according to US regulators, while the World Heath Organization classifies them as carcinogens.

But the US Food and Drug Administration is poised to rule on that soon, when it takes up a panel's report on tanning salons and minors' access to them. Dr. David Fisher of Massachusetts General Hospital and Dr. William James of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine urge the agency to join France, Germany, Austria, Finland, and Britain in tightening their rules for people under 18. When the agency held hearings in March, the Indoor Tanning Association, a national trade group, said in a statement that it considered current regulations sufficient for protecting its customers.

Writing in this week's New England Journal of Medicine, Fisher and Williams cite clinical studies linking tanning to a rise in cases of melanoma -- the most dangerous form of skin cancer -- particularly among women between 15 and 35 years old.

"A number of promising new drugs for metastatic melanoma are progressing slowly through clinical trials to satisfy FDA's stringent safety and efficacy criteria -- requirements that, remarkably, have not been applied to indoor tanning devices," the dermatologists write in their commentary. "Relatively few human cancers are tightly linked to a known environmental carcinogen. Given the mechanistic and epidemiologic data, we believe that regulation of this industry may offer one of the most profound cancer-prevention opportunities of our time."