Cancer Society wrong on melanoma risk

For three years now, sunsafe campaigners have been appealing for calm and "more research" before making "hasty" decisions about the dangers of UV rays. But now two new scientific studies have confirmed one of medical science's worst fears – sunsafe campaigns could actually be far more hazardous to your health than sunbathing. IAN WISHART, JOHN FAUBER and RON KOTULAK have the story

For two decades now, we've been told to slip, slop, slap; that the sun is dangerous and will kill us. We've encouraged an entire generation of kids to grow up with these secret fears, reinforced by politically-correct and well-intentioned community advertising campaigns. But all the way through, some things just didn't seem to gel. Firstly, humans have always had plenty of sun exposure in the past, yet it is only since the widespread use of sunscreens that skin cancer rates have appeared to rise.

In the early 1990s, a Norwegian Cancer Institute research scientist, Professor Johan Moan, made a staggering announcement in the British Journal of Cancer: while the annual incidence of melanoma in Norway had quadrupled between 1957 and 1984, there had been no corresponding change in the ozone layer over the region. "Ozone depletion is not the cause of the increase in skin cancers," his medical journal report notes.

As if to emphasise the rapid increase in skin cancer rates, the Norwegians re-analysed the data just a few years later and found the rates had grown again, a 600% increase in skin cancer between 1960 and 1990 – just thirty years! Yet still no change in ozone levels.

New Zealand and Australia – two of the countries that were first to latch on to the sunsafe message – now have the highest rates of melanoma in the world.

And it's not just skin cancer – other types of cancer have rocketed upwards as well. Until now, scientists have not made a connection between all these things, but that's all changing.

Two new scientific studies out this month have added to the growing mountain of evidence that our obsession with reducing sun exposure and slathering ourselves in sunscreen could actually be killing us. At the heart of the debate is vitamin D – a crucial ingredient, it now turns out, in the battle against a whole range of modern illnesses. Vitamin D is produced by the skin's exposure to the sun's "harmful" ultraviolet rays. If you protect yourself from UV rays by covering up all the time, chances are your body is not topping up its vitamin D storage banks. And the impact of that can be fatal.

One of the new studies shows a massive increase in the risk of heart disease among people who have low levels of vitamin D, while another shows increased sun exposure actually reduces your chances of dying from skin cancer!