Leader: Skin cancer deaths

Published on Friday 12 March 2010 09:29

WE SCOTS have a bad record when it comes to making the right decisions about our health.

Drinking too much, smoking, eating the wrong things and not taking enough exercise . . . we come bottom of too many health league tables and top of too many that record diseases.

To the latter must be added melanomas. As we report today, the number of deaths from skin cancer in the Lothians doubled last year.

The figure has fluctuated in recent years but the trend has been generally upwards, and the 2009 figure was the highest ever recorded. As such, it is now one of our biggest preventable killers. Too many Scots are quite literally dying for a nice tan.

Last year, the number of skin cancer deaths was 170 – and it is now the most common cancer among young adults.

The high incidence may be partly down to genetics and our fair skin. Scots are now exposed to the sun more than ever, and certainly this has been used to explain why so many Australians of North European descent have fallen victim; there, some 1,200 people die of melanoma each year.

But two weeks on the Med doesn't fully explain the rise in skin cancer among Scots. The evidence points to other lifestyle choices, notably improper use of tanning machines.

There must be hope that the casualty rate will fall following last year's pioneering Scottish legislation which banned under-18s from hiring sunbeds and unstaffed salons.

If not, then yet more drastic measures may yet be necessary to save tan-obsessed Scots from themselves.

Keeping track

WE MAY not quite be at the end of the line, but there is no doubt that the trams project is at a crunch stage.

Yesterday, the News laid bare the fury and disagreement at the heart of the saga – not just between TIE and their contractors but also between the various factions and politicians at the city council.

Judging by council leader Jenny Dawe's reaction to the SNP's Steve Cardownie yesterday, those rows show no signs of abating.

Dawe at least finally seems to realise the truth in what the News has been arguing for months: it is time for a full and frank public disclosure on all the facts about the trams project.

But we won't accept a report being kicked into the long grass beyond the election. If they want the patience of the people of Edinburgh, they must tell them what they need to know NOW.