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President’s Blog: What’s happened to sun safety?
Friday January 10, 2025
Looking back, the 1980s were a relative golden age of sun safety awareness. Slip, Slop, Slap was everywhere as a public health message, and children, having learnt about it at school or seen it on the TV, were educating their parents about it. No hat, no play rules were introduced. I still remember the public humiliation and what we would now call FOMO of sitting under a tree while everyone else in my otherwise hatted Year 6 class played cricket.
What’s happened since then?
The Cancer Council is certainly still interested, and indeed recently mutated the slogan into Slip, Slop, Slap, Seek, Slide. Perhaps “Seek”, referring to seeking shade, has had some cut-through, as cabanas have proliferated on our beaches or, as our Prime Minister might put it, grown like cancers. (The PM’s recent populist anti-cabana commentary was rightly condemned by public health groups around the country.)
It does feel like sun safety is going backwards. About a year ago I was hopeful that the choice of the Melanoma Institute of Australia’s co-leads, Professors Georgina Long and Richard Scolyer, as Australians of the Year would draw attention to this issue and lead to a renaissance in sun safety. Governments, policymakers and institutions don’t seem to have budged.
Most schools pay little attention to whether children, including those too young to take responsibility for their own safety in most other respects, reapply sunscreen during the day. Sporting clubs, including at professional levels, do not by and large enforce or even actively encourage sunscreen-wearing.
Say what we might about personal responsibility and the nanny state, but we don’t allow mine workers onto site without high-visibility clothing, people working with particulate matter or infectious agents not to wear masks, or workers on roofs not to wear harnesses. Why is protecting people to whom we have a duty of care from the most ubiquitous carcinogen different?
