Freelance writer Marlene Cimons is a former Washington reporter for the Los Angeles Times who specializes in science and medicine. She writes regularly for the National Science Foundation, Climate Nexus, Microbe Magazine and the Washington Post Health Section, from which this article is adapted, and she is an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. Cimons contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
Betty Jordan always regarded melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, as a white person's disease. "Whenever I heard the word, my mind would automatically think: 'Caucasian,''' she said. "It was something I never worried about.''
Dark-skinned people produce more melanin — the pigment that gives skin its color — than Caucasians. Melanin helps block damaging ultraviolet rays from the sun and from artificial light sources such as tanning beds, giving people of color greater protection against skin cancer than whites. But they still are susceptible. So Jordan was shocked five years ago to learn that the quarter-size dark spot on her left foot was acral lentiginous melanoma (ALM), an aggressive cancer that disproportionately afflicts African Americans and other dark-skinned people.
