TRANSCRIPT
A Cancer Council campaign from earlier this year.
Exposing social media influencers spreading deadly messages about tanning.
With hashtags like #killertan and #makingmelanomas - this ad campaign is targeting a demographic most likely to be out in the sun: young men and women.
Professor Georgina Long AO is Co-Medical Director of Melanoma Institute Australia.
"I think social media is playing a huge role in peer-to-peer pressure to glamorise tanning basically and looking beautiful. And tanning is associated with all of these very fashionable or ideals of beauty, and that's what we've got to crack. That's the code we've got to crack because it's not associated with beauty in my view. It's associated with cancer spreading death and devastation. Patients suffer with skin cancer and melanoma that's spread around their body every day. I see this. So, we need to use that tool for good. Social media is great in that we can try and use it to create good messages."
The message of the dangers of sun exposure has been one Australian health professionals have been pushing for a long time.
This campaign dates back to 1980 with a slogan still in use today.
Slip, slop, slap
To get a clearer idea of our sun seeking habits, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has partnered with the Cancer Council to release its first ever data on sun protection behaviours in Australia.
A total of 8,595 people across Australia aged 15 years and over were surveyed between November last year and February.
Robert Long, the director of the Health Statistics at the ABS breaks down some of the key findings.
"One of the headline indicators is that one in 14 Australians have been sunburnt in the previous week, younger Australians and males particularly more likely to get sunburnt. So, for example, 15 per cent of Australians aged 15 to 24 years old were more likely to have been sunburnt and that's compared to only 2 per cent of Australians aged 65 years and older. And also, males were more likely to be sunburnt than females. So, 8 per cent of males compared to 6 per cent of females. And this was particularly true for those aged 25 to 34 years where we had 12 per cent of males getting sunburnt compared to only 6 per cent of females."
On most days in the last month during the survey period, just over 38.1 per cent of Australians used SPF30 or higher sunscreen.
Females were more likely to wear sunscreen on most days than males and just under 10 per cent tried to get a suntan in the last 12 months.
As for sunburn - rates varied according to where people live.
Mr Long explains.
"People in Tasmania were much more likely to be getting sunburnt. So, 7 per cent of Australians overall got sunburnt in the past week, but that was 11 per cent in Tasmania. We also saw some interesting differences with people using sunscreen. Two in five Australians used sunscreen in the last month during the survey period, but this was much higher in the ACT. So, 49 per cent of people in the ACT use sunscreen and only 35 per cent of people in Queensland used sunscreen. And actually, the ACT were showing some good protection behavior overall."
Professor Anne Cust is the Chair of Cancer Council’s National Skin Cancer Committee.
She says the higher rates in Tasmania were likely due to a perception that cooler weather meant less sun exposure.
"We know that UV is not related to temperature. So, you can have in the summertime, the UV can be extremely high, but it might be a cool day. And we know from the data that more Tasmanians reported being outside in the peak UV times for more than 15 minutes. So, it's not surprising then that Tasmanians report more sunburns because it's probably easier for them to be outside for a longer period if it wasn't so hot. Yet still the UV levels were very high. So, it's a good reminder that UV doesn't necessarily mean that it's hot, that you can get sunburnt even on cloudy days or if there's a bit of wind around and it's cooler."
Australia has one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates that around 19,000 Australians will be diagnosed with melanoma this year.
Professor Georgina Long sees the pain that skin cancer causes every day in her work.
"The scary thing is that our young people seem to be most at risk and not heeding the advice of sun safety. And we really need to get the message to them so that we can decrease that risk of melanoma and enjoy our climate in a very sun safe way. Skin cancer kills. Melanoma kills. Nearly 2000 people per annum in Australia die of skin cancer. We know someone is diagnosed with melanoma in Australia every 30 minutes. We need to decrease that."
Too much exposure to UV radiation is the biggest risk factor and exposure in early life can have major long-term effects.
Professor Anne Cust says while skin cancer rates in Australia remain the highest in the world, there has been a slight drop in some age groups that might be partly due to changing ethnic demographics.
"We know that two and three Australians will get a skin cancer in their lifetime. It's by far the highest incidence rates of skin cancer in the world. And we know that young people overall, the trends seem to be that the incidence of skin cancer is reducing slightly. We think that's partly due to our sun protection campaigns, but also there's some new data showing that might be also partly due changing diversity in our population in terms of ethnic background. But we know that for people in middle age and older age, the skin cancer incidence is growing really strongly. And so that rates keep going up and up."
Is there any level of healthy sun exposure in Australia?
Early this year researchers from the QIMR Berghofer, a medical research institute based in Queensland - released guidelines about better balancing the positive and negative benefits of sun exposure in Australia.
Professor Rachel Neale is Group Leader of the Cancer and Aetiology and Prevention Laboratory at QIMR Berghofer.
The laboratory is looking at safe sun exposure to maintain sufficient vitamin D levels.
Vitamin D is important for maintaining a healthy skin, immune system, muscle and brain function and people with darker skin may require more sun exposure to maintain healthy levels of vitamin D.
Here is Professor Neale speaking on social media earlier this year about the guidelines.
"The previous guidelines really didn't explicitly recognise the diversity in Australia's population and the ways in which that influences that difference in the balance. For Vitamin D production, the best approach is to expose as much skin as possible for as shorter time as possible. So, you can imagine if you expose only your face, there's only a small part of you to make vitamin D, and you've got to be out for a long time really doing some damage. So, more skin short time is the message that we give for vitamin D production. What I would say though is that all people, except for those with deeply pigmented skin, should be putting on sunscreen as part of their normal morning routine."
QIMR Berghofer classifies people into three broad groups when it comes to skin types.
There are those with very deeply pigmented skin who are at low risk of getting skin cancer caused by exposure to the sun, those with very pale skin which is very sun sensitive and at highest risk of getting skin cancer with the third group lying somewhere in between.
People with pale skin require very little sun exposure to maintain vitamin D levels.
As for Australia's multicultural communities and attitudes to tanning and sun exposure, Professor Long says while there is no definitive data on attitudes to tanning, migration can have a profound effect on a range of health outcomes.
"I can't give you a data-driven answer precisely on that except to say we know in some migrant populations the idea of beauty is changing. For example, you may come from a country where staying out of the sun having very fair skin is held up as something to aim for. But then when they migrate to Australia, that ideal in the people who are brought up in Australia, the next generation down is lost and therefore they start seeking tanning and the idea of fashion and what's beautiful. So that definitely is happening. And we know that from lots of medical issues that when you migrate at a young age to a new country, you often pick up the social norms of that country you adopt and therefore are exposed to risks that they may come with. And sun exposure and tanning is just one of those."
The Cancer Council says the most effective way for people to protect their skin is to use all five forms of sun protection when the UV is three or above.
These are using a broad-spectrum, water-resistant SPF 50 or SPF 50+ sunscreen, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, protective clothing, sunglasses and seeking shade.
