Sun Smart

Attended a talk today on being Sun Smart, part of the health and safety emphasis that our company has.

It was quite funny when the nurse who was giving us the talk asked everyone in the room to stand up and then got groups of people to sit down if the questions she asked applied to them. On the first question (did you grow up in Australia?), three-quarters of the room sat down. After the third question, only a handful of people remained standing (I think the Asian % was significant then, it seems that Asians are more likely to keep out of the sun) and these were the people who weren't in the high risk category.

Learnt some interesting facts about skin cancer :-

* 1 in 2 Aussies will get skin cancer at some point (that is scary, just growing up in Australia makes you high risk, even worse if you are in Queensland).

* Skin cancer is caused by UV rays which have nothing to do with the temperature. Even if it is cold, you can still get sunburnt at the times when the UV index is high.

* Here in Melbourne, September to April (10am to 2pm/ 11am to 3pm (during daylight savings)) is when you must have sunscreen on whatever the temperature is because that is when the index is high.

It's a little bit hard to attune to putting on sunscreen when the weather is < 20 degrees these days but now I will definitely make a note of that.

Wonder why we never bother with sunscreen while we are in Singapore although it is near the equator...lots of cloud cover? Maybe we should have too!

Read more about being Sun Smart here.