Why sunburns can cause skin cancer but getting yourself burn on a hot surface can’t?

Question

I’m not completely sure about this, during the summer we get tons of warnings about protecting ourselves from the sun, but once I was burn with hot oil while cooking and no one in the hospital told me anything about skin cancer risks.

In: 0

Answer 1

A sunburn is tissue damage from ultraviolet light. It can damage cells when it hit them. It can change DNA and other parts of the cell.

Most damaged cells will detect it and go apoptosis, programmed cell death, so the cell kills itself and gets broken down into it’s constituent part. A sunburn feels warm for a long time because the body increases the blood flow to that part to transport away the remnants of dead cells.

Cells that kill themself like that might sound stage but in an adult, there is normally 50-70 billion cells that do that each day.

Radiation poisoning is in part that too many cells kill themselves and the body can take care of what is produced and it reaches a level that can kill you. Another part is that too few working cells remain to do a required task.

Skin cancer is if the damage is to the DNA in a part that controls how the cell division is regulated. If the damage is not detected and the cell kills itself it might just start to divide itself and create two new cells that continue to do that. Cancer is in human cells that just grow with no limits.

If you burn yourself by touching something hot it will damage cells from the heat. There is not a large risk that a cell gets heated so just a part of the DNA is changed and the cell survives and can cause cancer. If heat can change the DAN the rest of the cell will be screwed.

You can get heat damage like that from the sun too, it requires concentration of the like by for example a lens. So you can burn your skin with a magnifying glass, and it can hurt within seconds do test it on some wood or something else, be careful because it is a way to start a fire.

The lenses in your eye can concentrate light like that, that is why you can quite quickly get eye damage if you look at the sun but your skin does not get burned the same way when you are out in the sun.