Skin cancer is sold as a meter reading: more sun, more cancer. Melanoma has never once behaved that way.
If it were the dose, it would favour the face and hands. It favours the back and the legs.
If it were the dose, farmers, roofers and fishermen would lead the tables. Office workers do.
If it were the dose, Greece and southern Italy would top Europe. Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands do.
If it were the dose, a century of moving indoors would have emptied the clinics. It filled them.
If it were the dose, fifty years of sunscreen would have bent the curve. The curve went up alongside the sales.
If it were the dose, your great-grandfather, outside from dawn in a vest, should have been riddled with it. He'd never heard the word.
Something else moved, and it moved inside the skin. Over that same century the fat people are made of was swapped from butter, lard and dripping to seed oil, the most easily oxidised fat there is, and ultraviolet is an oxidiser.
The sun is the match. It has been the same match for four billion years.
We're the ones who changed what it lands on.

תגובות