Blacks are not Immune

last updated Sunday August 19 2007

Whenever I hear the title statement I always wonder what it means. Is it that blacks are really well protected against UV light but not completely? Like how a bulletproof jacket is good protection but not against say a rifle or an AK-47? Or is it that since one drop of black blood makes someone black, (to this day people still adhere to that crap) when people who are mostly white get skin cancer it counts as a black person getting skin cancer?

This article was going to be a bit of a mouth off without research :) but then I figured "hey, I really don't know and it should be easy to find out." So I went did a search and this was one the clearest articles my search returned. The article implies that it isn't "light-skinned" blacks getting skin cancer, because the location of the cancers that blacks get are not in places exposed to a lot of sunlight eg palms of the hand and soles of the feet. This info further suggests that it isn't the sun causing these skin cancers at all so that makes me a little satified. The rest of the info I found wasn't really very heartening though.

Apparently black people get more cancer in general than white people even accounting for similar income and education level. One suggested reason is because black people have less vitamin D in their systems than white people, even accounting for intake aside from milk, which fewer black people use than white people since they're much more lactose intolerant.

My theory is this, assuming that vitamin D deficiency accounts for the differences in cancer rates between races, which this other study suggests because blood with similar amounts of vitamin D across the races had equal incidences of cancer, black people may make less vitamin D from exposure to sunlight than white people.

Seems to make sense, closer to the equator in continetal Africa there's lots of sun so to protect their skin black people had increased melanin. In continetal Europe white people had to make the same amount of vitamin D as a black person, with less sunlight therefore higher efficiency. Therefore blacks in the U.S.A at a higher latitude than the equator will be at a disadvantage in creating vitamin D from sunlight.

I'd like to see a similar study with people in the Caribbean and Africa.