Sunscreen Can Kill

I actually wrote this blog post in June, but forgot to post it. There's still a few weeks left to New England sunscreen weather, so feel free to pass this info along...

 The sun is shining, and the days are getting longer.  For most of us, the arrival of warm weather is like a new beginning each Spring.  But for me, it begins the season of anxiety.    My son is severely allergic to chemical sunscreens.

With most allergies -- for example, my own shellfish allergy -- there are simple precautions I can take.  I carefully read product ingredients, I don’t  cook shellfish in my home, and I avoid restaurants that have shellfish on their menus.  But with my son’s allergy, it isn’t quite as simple.  Of course, we avoid using any sunscreen with the offending ingredients, and we make sure he doesn’t share things like face masks or flippers which may have traces of the chemicals on them.  And when the kids have friends over, we provide a chemical free sunscreen for them to use so they don’t rub the offending ingredients into our furniture where they could rub off on my son and cause a reaction.  But it’s not quite as easy as that.  This is because of the widespread use of spray sunscreens.  Whereas with most allergies, there are certain precautions you can take to avoid exposure.  A peanut allergic person would never to go, say, Texas Roadhouse, where people are eating peanuts at every table and the dust is surely saturated in the air.  But with spray sunscreens, there really is no safe place in summer.  People use these products because they are quick and easy to apply.  But to the 1-2 percent of Americans who are allergic to  chemical sunscreen ingredients, they can be deadly.  The particles are quite small and travel through the air quickly and with great dispersion.  One slight breeze can carry the product far beyond your beach towel.  With this allergy, there really isn’t much control.

My son was diagnosed with this allergy when he was one and a half years old after several bouts of anaphalaxis.  For the remainder of that first summer and for the next summer, I simply avoided public places during hot, sunny days when I knew people would be spraying sunscreens willy-nilly in an effort to protect themselves and loved ones from harmful rays.  But as the kids got older, they wanted to go swimming, or to parks, and so we ventured out, epi-pen  and doses of Benadryl in hand.  We joined a private pool and I got in the habit, to let the 10 or so other families know about my son’s allergy and apologetically ask that if they could either wait until there was no wind to apply sunscreen and go to a closed-off pre-determined place to spray,  or use the extra bottles of sunscreen I had brought, or just simply alert us they were going to spray so we could leave the area for 30 minutes or so until the particles settled so my son wouldn’t breathe them in.  Most people willingly obliged and offered sympathy to my son for having to be so cautious to simply play outside.  However, once, while we were in a public restroom at a local Petting Zoo, a woman began liberally spraying sunscreen in the confined space.  My son, then 3, smelled the sunscreen and began to panic.  In a knee-jerk reaction, I began screaming like a crazy person, “Stop spraying!  Stop spraying!”  And through tears began to explain my son’s allergy to the other mom while covering my son with a towel.  “Relax.”  The woman said, looking thoroughly annoyed as she rolled her eyes. “ I stopped. No need to panic..”  So I hurried my son outside and looked under the towel covering him to see his eyes, nose and ears swollen shut, and his now-puffy hands quickly tearing at his tongue to relieve what seemed to be an intensely itchy, swollen tongue. Even more terrifying for me was  the gurgling, gasping sound he made, followed by his little head and shoulders slumping forward.  After I administered the Epi-Pen Jr. I always carried with me, I looked up to see the look of fear on the previously annoyed woman’s face.   Then I heard the repeated apologies, which leads me to the moral of this piece:

I can’t think of another product which can invade someone’s persona l space as much as a spray sunscreen.  And for a small percentage of people, that invasion can be fatal.  There should be a warning on each canister that states that individuals should take precaution when using these products because the spray may cause anaphalaxis in some individuals.  It should not be sprayed in confined, public areas, and it should not be sprayed in very windy conditions.

Several of the chemicals in question have already been banned in Japan and in the EU for various reasons (allergy, photosensitivity, increased incidence of tumors, to name a few), and as the U.S. EPA has recently begun to take action to review potentially hazardous ingredients for cosmetics and household products, I believe that eventually these sunscreens will be reviewed and banned in this country as well.  But until then, just letting people know of the potential for anaphalaxis in some individuals, especially with a product that really does disperse readily into the air where it can be breathed in and cause an immediate, potentially fatal reaction, would be a good, responsible start.