Skin cancer theory gets burned

01 December 1996

Is skin cancer caused by too much sunbathing? This much cherished view has received a further battering recently, this time by researchers from Yale.

They have found a link between sunburn and a melanoma that may form later at the exact same spot, but this seemed to bear no relation to the position of any tumour.

Even so, they were unable to explain why quite a number of melanomas form on parts of the body that are rarely, if ever, exposed to the sun (Int Jrnl of Cancer, 1996; 67: 636-46).

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