Decades of Sun-Safety Campaigns Are Finally Showing Up in the Data
Australia has spent forty years telling people to cover up, and it is fair to wonder whether all that messaging actually worked. A landmark Queensland study offers some of the clearest evidence yet that it did. The findings are cautiously reassuring, and they say something important about persistence in public health. A Forty-Year View Researchers examined more than 100,000 Queenslanders diagnosed with a first melanoma between 1982 and 2022, tracking how often they went on to develop a second, separate melanoma. People with one melanoma carry a substantially higher risk of another. The trend told a story. The risk of a second primary melanoma climbed from the 1980s, peaked at almost 8 per cent within a decade for those diagnosed in the early 2000s, and has since begun to plateau…









