BROADCASTER OLIVER CALLAN has revealed that his absence from the airwaves in recent days was due to surgery for skin cancer.

The announcement coincided with Tánaiste Micheál Martin’s support from calls from within his party for tanning beds to be banned on health grounds, stating that the evidence around sunbeds is very strong and therefore the action ‘must be banning.’

Skin cancer is the most common cancer in Ireland with over 13,000 new cases every year, a figure that the National Cancer Registry expects to double by 2040.

‘If the evidence, and the evidence is very strong around sunbeds and cancer, then the action is clear. The action has to be banning that. It is injurious to the health of the people.

‘I would have to work with the respective ministers and I don’t want to give specific timelines now. But I think a decision needs to be agreed in principle on that,’ the Tánaiste concluded.

Taoiseach Simon Harris said in the Dáil recently that he was supportive of taking further action and would seek the view of current Health Minister Stephen Donnelly.

But do Irish people, keen to get some baseline cover before exposing their pale limbs on a night out or holiday, know the risks or take the evidence of a risk of skin cancer seriously?

Recent reports suggest that they do not. I naively assumed that commercial sunbeds had been overtaken by the now widely available and much improved tanning products on the market. I was wrong.

A recent survey of more than 1,000 people in Ireland published in Skin Health and Disease, last May found that more than one in ten (10.6%) had used a sunbed in the last year with an average of eight sessions each.

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Lead author, Professor Michelle Murphy at South Infirmary Victoria Hospital and University College Cork, said that 41.5% had used sunbeds at any time. Reasons for using them included: feeling and looking better with a........

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