Smash hit

“If somebody wants to go in and out of the pool all day on holiday,” Rees says, “then sunblock is useful to stop them getting sore and blistered. But I would question the need to start warning them about cancer. I am pretty tanned, because I have been lying on a beach reading books about genetics. And I think that if you look at the risks, it seems quite reasonable to say that’s a choice people make.”

Yet the lack of hard evidence to support their case has not stopped the anti-sunbathing campaigns becoming more aggressive. A recent editorial in the British Medical Journal argued that we should be warned to stay out of the sun altogether, rather than to wear sunblock. The authors said that “risk-taking behaviour with respect to exposure to the sun continues”.

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, author of The Tyranny of Health: doctors and the regulation of lifestyle, has long criticised such creeping attempts to police personal behaviour in the name of public health. “Though malignant melanoma may be rare, moles are common and sunbathing is popular, so there is enormous scope for scaremongering, and especially for encouraging parental guilt about protecting children.” At least one London expert now advocates prosecuting parents for neglect if their child gets sunburnt.

The moral authority of a spokeswoman for SunSmart, Cancer Research UK’s government-backed skin cancer awareness campaign, was not helped when she turned up for a BBC Radio 5 Live discussion this month sporting an “accidental” tan from her Greek holiday. But SunSmart insists that public education programmes in the UK are vital and will bear fruit. “The Australian sun awareness campaign has shown that with a sustained ‘drip-drip’ approach to information, people will eventually change their habits,” a spokesman says.

For Fitzpatrick, however, this is another attempt to make us alter our “bad” habits on spurious medical grounds. “Whether or not people choose to sunbathe is not a health issue,” he says. “To me it is one of the most boring activities imaginable. But that is no reason to start telling others what they should do with their leisure time, and trying to justify it by scaring them to death about killer moles that they are highly unlikely to see.”

The Aussie experience

WITH a quarter of a million new skin cancers diagnosed each year, Australia has one of the highest rates in the world. Malignant melanoma is the fourth most common form of cancer in the country; in terms of mortality, it is the eighth most common, accounting for 2.5 per cent of cancer-related deaths. In 1980 the Australian Government introduced the “Slip, Slop, Slap” campaign to promote better sun health awareness. For years the “Slip on a T-shirt, Slop on some Sunscreen and Slap on a Hat” message was promoted heavily. Subsequent campaigns may have altered the delivery, but the message has been retained. Has it worked? Although the incidence of skin cancer continues to rise, this is at a lower rate, say experts, than it would have been without a health education campaign.

Incidence Mortality
(% increase per annum in the 1990s)

Men Women Men Women

Britain 4.2 1.6 2.9 1.2

Australia 2.5 1.6 0.2 -0.7