Sunbed Warning From Skin Cancer Survivor
A North East man is calling for tougher laws on sunbed shops after he was diagnosed with skin cancer at 29 years old
A North East man is calling for tougher laws on sunbed shops after he was diagnosed with skin cancer at 29 years old.
Philip Bell from North Shields started using the sunbeds at sixteen. He was paying just ÂŁ10 for an hour on the beds in a shop close to his home.
Back then he said it was cheaper than faking it and there was a lot of pressure to have the perfect tan.
This year he decided to get a lump on his face checked out that had been there for four years. It turned out to be a slow forming skin cancer and he had surgery to remove it two weeks ago.
Philip is now warning that it could happen to anyone that uses sunbeds or doesn’t protect their skin well on holiday.
He’s calling for a ban on cheap sunbed offers and further limits on how much time you can spend on one.
“There is that image in Newcastle of people wanting to have a tan. Occasionally spray tans are a lot more costly and the effects don’t last as long and I think that’s where young people are thinking well I’ll have a sunbed, it’ll last longer. That’s part of the problem.”
“The doctor gave me the mirror to look at my face and I had this huge hole in my face and that’s when the shock it. I thought wow, this really isn’t worth it for the all the years that I’ve wanted to have a tan. I know for sure that it wasn’t worth that risk.”
The latest figures show that skin cancer rates have trebled in the North East over the past 20 years.
It’s claimed that if more action isn’t taken to stop young people from damaging their skin on the sunbed or at the beach then there could be an epidemic of skin cancer rates.
That’s according to Rob Ellis who is a Consultant Dermatologist at James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough.
Every day he says he sees numerous cases of young people with the signs of skin cancer and thinks that if there’s better regulation on sunbed shops then it could help ease the strain on health services.
“It does baffle me that there appears to be this strong link between such high levels of UV light that people are able to obtain very easily and why the legislation is not stronger around it as it is with other known carcinogens like tobacco for instance.”
“We don’t really know what the levels are that are needed to produce skin cancer in different people but obviously every time you expose the skin to these high levels you’re essentially rolling the dice as to whether or not that DNA damage can be repaired by the body or whether it does develop as skin cancer.”
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