Travel Guide > Travel Health > Skin Cancer
Skin Cancer is the most common cancer now in the United States, with over one million new cases each year. Unlike other illnesses you can develop while travelling the choices you make that help skin cancer grow on your body will not affect you for many years if not decades. Skin cancer is caused by damage at the cellar level by UV radiation.
Any kind of tan or sunburn is cellar damage by UV radiation. Yes your skin will heal afterwards but that damage is accumulative and lasts for the rest of your life. Imagine every tan or much worse sunburn as being hit by a baseball bat lightly. At first it does very little damage but over time it can kill you.
There is no vaccination for skin cancer, although if the proper care is taken most people can avoid skin cancer.
The main symptoms are crabs or changes in the skin that never heal, ulcers in the skin, discoloration and changes in preexisting moles. Here is information on the three most common kinds of skin cancer:
Most treatment methods involve removing the tumor from your skin. If found and removed quickly then risk for death is very low. Remember that UV radiation damage is accumulative so therefore it is very possible that another tumor can grow on or near the same spot of previous tumors and many skin cancer victims have to return every year in order to remove new tumors.
This is version 1. Last edited at 14:50 on Jul 25, 08 by Lavafalls (+2716). 1 article links to this page.

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