All these new bronze age health warnings will be the death of me

“THIS is the news at 11 o’clock. Good morning. Health campaigners warned today that we are all going to die. That is the conclusion from a comprehensive study conducted by researchers at Anytown University on behalf of the United Nations’ World Food Programme. The scientists observed rats in laboratory conditions over a 10-year period and found that by the end of the study, they were all dead.

“The same could happen to humans unless the Government urgently introduces legislation to ban dying. The only question is, over what period of time,” Prof Pete Sake told our reporter.

“We are especially concerned because none of the rats in the sample group smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol, took drugs, ate junk food, or drove at high speed down country lanes. They just died, every single one. We are following several lines of inquiry but our working assumption is that the rats must have sneaked off for 10 minutes on a sunbed while the lab assistants weren’t looking.”

OK, so no one would wish to make light of death, or of cancer, but are you getting as cynical as me about all these earnest studies which find living leads inexorably to dying?

The latest one is from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organisation (WHO).

It has reviewed its advice on sunbeds, categorising them in the highest risk cancer-causing substances and habits.

Where the use of sunbeds was until recently judged to be “probably carcinogenic to humans”, there is no longer any ambiguity. Just like asbestos exposure, arsenic and cigarettes, they have concluded emphatically: sunbeds cause cancer. Their most startling claim was that the risk of skin melanoma is increased by 75% if the use of sunbeds starts before the age of 30.

Health campaigners are ecstatic: already the cancer charities are demanding tighter regulations, a ban on sunbed use for the under-18s and for tanning salons to be plastered with health warnings.

Presumably, once they have achieved those goals, they will also be seeking an advertising ban and a code of conduct governing references to sunbeds in soap operas.

As with risk assessments in other areas of modern life — from the threat of terrorism to the threat of pandemics — upward shifts in cancer risk categorisation make for attention-grabbing, unsubtle headlines. But does using a sunbed once in a while really mean we’re going to die? Or, come to think of it, does it mean that those of us who don’t use sunbeds are not going to die? Or is it, yet again, a case of everything in moderation? And it’s not just sunbeds that are labelled dangerous: it’s the sun itself.

The first day of summer each year and we’re being told to check up on vulnerable relatives and neighbours, to draw the curtains at home and to stay out of the sun. And if you really must venture outdoors, wear a wide-brimmed hat and apply plenty of high-factor sunblock. You’d think we were all spending our August weekends on Bondi beach, not tentatively dipping our toes in the icy Atlantic.

Coco Chanel is usually the one fingered for our modern-day bronze age. The story goes that she accidentally took too much sun while holidaying in the Med aboard the Duke of Westminster’s yacht in 1923. Until then, it was pale skin to which modish society aspired, suggestive of a leisurely life spent indoors rather than hours of toil in the fields. Photographed coming ashore, it is said she unwittingly sparked a fashion for mahogany skin that has remained with us ever since.

Others suggest it was British royalty in the 1890s who popularised the glow, the first artificial tanning device having been invented by Mr Kellogg of cornflakes fame.

Either way, I tend to the view that most of us are not actually idiots. We kind of know instinctively, without having to test the proposition, that if you laid out a few rashers of bacon on a sunbed and switched on for an hour, they would probably come out crispy and golden. If you don’t know that, you’re probably too far gone in a sea of calories and computer games to care. What else do you think a sunbed is but a human grill? Does the not-very-revelatory revelation from the WHO really mean, however, that we need yet another 100 pages of legislation?

Why does the health lobby assume that everyone — except their blameless selves, naturally — is a chimp? I have news for them: you’re going to die too! Now, it is true that rates of skin cancer in northern Europe have soared in the past few decades. Campaigners eagerly attribute much of the blame directly to sunbed use, gliding over the fact that most skin cancers are actually benign and that skin cancer has the lowest mortality rate of them all.

Indeed, some studies suggest melanomas — the deadly ones — actually tend to occur on parts of the body that are almost never exposed to ultraviolet rays; they are also more prevalent among some ethnic groups than others. As for any effects from using sunbeds, it depends on the frequency and duration of exposure. But even if some definitive link could be established, the question of just how much should be done reaches right down into the principles underpinning liberal democracy. Government is certainly entitled to interfere with people’s behaviour — but only in so far as it affects other people.

Otherwise, well-informed individuals should be allowed to make their own choices. If they want to harm themselves — smoking, drinking, over-eating, tanning — that’s up to them.

Once upon a time, governments trusted citizens to use commonsense when it came to keeping themselves alive. Not anymore.

WE ALL recall how the Government sold the smoking ban. Passive smoking, it argued, kills other people. Confronted with the facts — that the numbers are statistically insignificant and most passive smoking occurs in the home, not in bars and restaurants — the Government had to change tack.

Non-smokers have the right to enjoy a non-smoky environment when they go out in the evening, they said. To which I would respond if enough people felt that way, the market would have catered for them.

That’s so much history; the smoking ban is here to stay. But the Government will have a hard time pinpointing the passive effects of sunbeds. Skin cancers aren’t catching, so far as I know. Besides, if sunbeds really were that dangerous, wouldn’t their users keel over so early and so quickly that they would be saving the state money in the long run?

What the Government should be doing (since the tanning industry doesn’t do it very effectively) is informing people. Lying on a sunbed for 15 minutes day in, day out probably isn’t a good idea but, apart from that, in moderate climates like ours, the risk of exposure from ultraviolet light is trivial.

The main reason why so many people have given up smoking is not because they have been taxed but because they have been made to feel stupid. Take a look at a tabloid newspaper and see who’s sporting the most unnatural tans. Would anyone accuse Jordan or Victoria Beckham of being, er, intelligent? That’s right: pale IS interesting.