Poison in Sun’s Rays

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVII, Issue 206, 15 August 1927, Page 10

Poison in Sun’s Rays

Ultra Violet Rays Generate Venom In Tissues. LONDON SPECIALIST'S EXPERIMENTS. Po>on in the Sun's rays is the latest scientific explanation for sunburn. According to Sir Thomas Lewis, who has been experimenting in Lon don, the ultra-violet health rays of the sun generate a poison under the akin, similar to snake venom. In a series of medical reports just issued it is stated that the redness and pain which follows the exposure of unaccustomed skin to brilliant sunlight are due to a poison much like the poison of snake venom. This poison is injected into the living layer of skin and even into the tiny arteries and veins which feed this living cover of the body. While the sun’s rays do not actually puncture the skin and thus inject the the poison, they produce the same result by causing the manufacture of the poison in the skin itself. The most characteristic symptom of sunburn is the reddening of the skin. This usually comes on within a few hours, sometimes within less than an hour, after the skin had an overdose of sunlight. If the dose is severe, blisters may be raised, and intolerable itching may follow. BLAMES SOLAR ACTION. AU these consequences, if not actually every one of them, are due, Sir Thomas and his associates believe, to the effects of this venomous chemical which the solar action generates in the human skin. . The name of the chemical is histamine. its * resemblance to the venom of the rattlesnake goes much deeper than the mere similarity in poisonous effects. The active chemi cal principle of the venom of the rattlesnake, as of other poisonous reptiles, happens to be, by a strange scientific paradox, very similar in chemical constitution to those healthful and necessary substances called protein, the substances which compose the highly nutritive part of fresh meat.

The proteins and the snake venoms are not absolutely the same; if they were they doubtless would behave the same in the human system, which they do not. However, the chemical differences between them are so slight that if science knew no better, it would doubtless consider the differ ences negligbile. The histamine chemical, which Sir Thomas Lewis blames for sunburn, belongs in this same class. It is a little simpler than the familial proteins of meat; .ndeed, it can be produced from some of these protein* by a moderate degree of treatment with distintegrating chemicals. Indeed, it is probable that the rays ol the sun actually produce this poisonous histamine in the human skin by causing such a partial disintegration of some of the protein which the living skin contains, as do all animal tissues.

How does sunlight operate to produce this histamine? Obvious!} there is no actual injection of the poison, as is practiced by rattlesnakes with their venom or by Six Thomas Lewis and his that enters the skin when the sun shines on it is a portion of the sun’s rays. The actual surface layer of the skin, the so called epidermis, is not a living tissue.

It is a hard, leathery material, seen under the microscope to be composed of a vast number of tiny overlapping scales not unlike the scales of a fish. This surface layer of skin wears off continually in the friction of life, and is renewed as continu ally by the actual living layer of the skin, the so-called dermis, which lies beneath it. The superficial dead layer, the epidermis, is reasonably transparent to sunlight. The sun’s rays do not affect it at all. Sunburg is produced when the rays penetrate this surface layer and reach the living skin cells beneath. The ultra-violet rays in the sun light, and perhaps some of the other rays also, penetrate the transparent epidermis and strike against the living cells beneath. In ordinary sunlight the rays which thus penetrate are seldom strong enough actually to kill the living skin cells, but they do damage them. One symptom of this damage is the discharge of n little histamine from the injured cell, exactly the same kind of reaction, as it happens, which would occur d these same cells were removed from the body and treated with damaging chemicals in a test tube.