Tanning has caused an epidemic of skin cancer

America is not experiencing an epidemic of skin cancer, if anything we’re experiencing an epidemic of skin cancer screenings.

Since the 1970s, groups like the Skin Cancer Foundation and the American Cancer Society—which both received funding from sunscreen companies—have campaigned to increase awareness of skin cancer. Chief among their advice is to get regular skin cancer screenings. As a result, the supposed "epidemic" is most likely the result of increased screenings, not an increase in actual skin cancer rates.

To that point, a 2005 study in the British Medical Journal found:

“The growth [of melanoma skin cancer diagnoses] is associated with an increased rate of melanoma detection—a finding that persists even after assuming an increase in the true occurrence of disease... Our data for trend also suggest that the true occurrence of melanoma has not changed.”

Similarly, Drs. A. Bernard Ackerman and Renata Joffe write in their book, “The Sun and the ‘Epidemic’ of Melanoma: Myth on Myth!”:

Based on numbers suspect at best, and cuckoo at worst, the “researchers” have created an epidemic of melanoma when, in fact, the only change has been an “epidemic” in diagnoses of melanoma... In brief, the incidence of diagnosis of melanoma has risen dramatically during the last three decades, but the true incidence of melanoma itself has not changed at all. That, however, is not what in 2006 the Skin Cancer Foundation is serving up for consumption to physicians and the laity. In a piece just distributed titled, “Bad to Worse: Melanoma Increases Again,” the declaration is made by the Foundation that “melanoma incidence in the United States has climbed more than 80 percent in the last two decades.”

As you can see, the British Medical Journal found that the number of diagnoses of melanoma increase with the number of screenings