21
May
2008
Melanoma; it’s a puzzle with peices missing. I’ve thought about this one long and hard, what if UVB doesn’t matter? Let me entertain yet another example of where we might be going drastically wrong.
“Most sunscreens do a good job blocking UVB, but fewer sunscreens filter out most of the UVA, so they do not help to prevent the beginnings of melanoma formation … The precise wavelengths of ultraviolet that contribute to the formation of skin cancer still need to be sorted out.” Source
We could be getting damaged melanocytes without the sunburn, right so how can you get skin cancer without being sunburnt? Well this question has never been asked. Nor has the “stay out of the sun between 11am and 4pm” bit of sunsmart been challenged.
UV index varies
I’ve noticed that peak UV hours and the times where I burn are after 4pm and before 6pm, not only the hottest part of the day but also what’s to say the UV index isn’t lower at 12pm because of cloud cover and greater at 6pm because of clear skies?
UVB might not be doing the damage
There are three types of UV radiation, and each type bassically vibrates the skin more or less. UVB is often connected to the burning effect the sun has on skin general rule is UVB = burning. Even if you get factor 50 sunscreen, SPF only measures effectiveness against UVB radiation not both UVA and B. UVA is often thought to really only age the skin and thus sunscreens have been utterly useless against UVA, but isn’t cancer linked to the ageing process?
Still we think UVB triggers most melanoma’s, but how can this be if most people with melanoma admit to making good use of sunscreens? UVA protection is measured by the star rating not the SPF and the star rating is really only a recent introduction and Ambre Solair’s UVA photostable filters have only just made it from Europe to the USA.
Sunscreens never protected against melanoma?
What if in the 1980’s and 1990’s we were told sunscreens would protect us, but it turns out that in fact it’s UVA which triggers melanoma and thus the protection we thought we had, simply never existed and still may not exist? Some retailers don’t sell lower than SPF 15, but what if it’s SPF 30 and still UVA rating of 1? Isn’t that also as bad as stocking SPF 2?
What if you can get melanoma skin cancer without a long history of sunburn, ok it is a bit far fetched, a lot of people did burn most of the time by accident and without intending to. But what if you can damage your skin even if you don’t burn, if you are genetically unable to produce melanin? What if it turns out UVB is attributed to non-melanoma and UVA to melanoma, suddenly you would need to advise people at risk of melanoma to not rely on SPF as a guide but the star rating.
Let’s get sunSmarter?
Everything you know is wrong, everything I know is slightly less wrong and everything they know is really wrong, so let’s re-write this. sunSmart needs to get smart about the UV index, for instance it might be safer to go out at 12pm under cloudy skies than it is to go out at 5pm under clear skies. so the 11am - 4pm curfew needs chucking out in favor of words on suncreen bottles explaining the UV index, what it is and how to check it for your location.
sunSmart also need get smarter about the advice given out to people at risk of melanoma and non-melanoma, each risk group needs different messages not the same messages and I was pleased to see that at least that bit of my campaign got through to Cancer Research UK.
Re-write the rules!
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21
May
2008
How strange a hyperlink with a percentage sign to start the href atrribute, crashes FF2 (2.0.0.14)?
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19
May
2008
Why don’t web based email clients use an iframe? Really, I mean come on, two body tags a headache? Iframe it baby!
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19
May
2008
Owh my back, I should be used to it as I do the flickr meets every two weeks! Walk for Skin in Sutton Park went well, was over far too fast though, quite a chilly day compared to what we had last week.
The walk aims to fund raise for various skin charities from changing faces to skin cancer research. Andy came over and we headed over to the park and waited for my parents, who had walked roughly a mile or so to get to the park anyway. At the end I spotted Lorna, who had helped organise things and had a brief chat. Many thanks for a great event, it just needs some race for life eyeballs really as dermatology touches more people.
We found the tent and had a look around, a brass band playing music to the group of people and a balloon man on stilts entertaining children. Me and Andy took a few photos and then we were off, with bacon buttie in hand.
We were trying to catch up with the front of the pack to get some good photos so ended up jogging certain bits, the walk for skin, just became the jog for skin.
Nice stroll through a nice and very local park (it’s a huge park too) and at the end we collected our goodie bags, went to get our forms stamped and headed back to the car.
There are more walks for skin, going up till June so check out the site:
Walk For Skin 2008 Venues
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15
May
2008
Unfortunatly the US presidential race just took another nasty turn with Senator John McCain’s melanoma coming out of the shadows and into the sunlight.
Already Barrack has used McCain’s survival as a swipe and he’s not alone as I’ve seen bloggers across the web pick up on this too. While it’s good that melanoma is now getting some higher profile names mentioned and thus getting mentioned in the press etc it has to be upsetting for John as it wouldn’t affect his ability to do the job at hand.
Ewan Mcgregor
Recently a much loved British actor spoke of his run in with skin cancer, but details seem vauge and as such I can’t work out if Ewan’s run in was with Melanoma or Non-melanoma, we can only hope it was either the latter or a very shallow melanoma. It was a good positive story hopefully which will encourage young men in particular to seek advice from their GP if they suspect something is wrong with a mole or group of moles.
Scotish Football - Celtic Legend Tommy Burns Dies
Story has been around today in fact. From looking into the story, again details are a little vauge, it looks like we’ve lost another high profile melanoma warrior. From what I can make out Tommy Burns was diagnosed with melanoma in early 2006. The story has been getting coverage but melanoma has not been mentioned, so the public in the UK are now unable to tell why Ewan Mcgregor will make it and why the odds were stacked against Tommy.
There is no difference being made in the press as to why Non-melanoma is a lot less serious than Melanoma, so I feel I should recap that it’s all to do with the direction of growth. Melanoma’s dig downwards into the lower layers of skin, so action is needed as soon as possible, non-melanomas tend to stay in the upper layers of skin and are as such a lot less life threatening.
If you are concerned, google “The ABC of melanoma”.
–
English Football - Bobby Robson
We can only hope Bobby Robson will carry on with his not so recent discovery of a very rare melanoma skin cancer.
A list of famous people who had melanoma
- Eva Cassidy
- Pat Sharpe
- Bob Marley
And Non-nelanoma
While it’s saddening that more people are being affected by skin cancer, it is a great opportunity for the media to start educating people about skin cancer and not about the sun. We can only hope anyway.
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15
May
2008
Microformats are very embroynic at the moment, this is perhaps a teaser of the future. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Firefox plugin to automatically collect contact details from websites and store them?
Further to this why not on each 5 or 6 visits to a website, have the browser check to see if your address book is out of sync with the website. A simple one click interface could allow you to get the new updated contact details, plus any additional updates which the web content creators have uploaded to the site. Imagine that power?
Filed under: Code, Articles | No Comments »
14
May
2008
Just found an interesting snag with the abbr design pattern when viewing some recent search results where I’ve used abbr for dates.
It seems that if the title attribute of the abbr tag is indexed by search engines, the dates are printed twice in two formats, presumably expansion of abbreviations makes sense for search engines. Let me chew this one over.
[edit:the day after]
Having thought about this, it does seem to be a flaw with search engines, or at least the emphasis should be on search engines to better understand the abbr HTML tag, why? Because abbreviations are usually written in brackets!
A recent example I found of an hCalendar date showed that Google in this instance actually printed out both the contents of the title attribute and the value in the tag itself which lead to a mangled date display along the lines of “2008-04-13April 13th 2008″. Imagine a proper abbreviation would read “Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)”.
However should the search engine suppress either the title attribute or the value in the tag? In theroy the engine should work as a screen reader in suppressing “HTML” and reading out Hypertext Markup Language instead, not both.
Coming full circle this may not be an issue with the abbr-design pattern at all but with the work around using span tags, but it should be noted that some search engines may turn semantic code into a bit of a mess, equally a developer who works around abbr issues with span classes may also make a mess of it.
Filed under: Code, Articles | 2 Comments »
