Cancer can strike at any age

It's hard to think about the damage too much sun can do in the middle of winter but Napier GP Marcia Sonneveld does - and with good reason.
Almost every day she sees the havoc it wreaks on the skins of Hawke's Bay residents young and old.
Everything from the relatively benign - crows feet, prematurely aged skin and sun spots - to skin cancers such as melanoma and carcinoma.
And it's not just the old who need to worry. Dr Sonneveld had recently treated a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old with melanoma.
In fact in the 1980s she lost a 21-year-old female patient to skin cancer.
It was an experience that still retained its power to shock her.
"It's the most horrible thing to have someone so young prepare for death," Dr Sonneveld said
Ever since she had been banging the drum for people to protect themselves from the potentially fatal effects of the sun's ultraviolet radiation.
She supported initiatives like the "slip, slop, slap and wrap" campaign but next month she planned to go one step further - into some Napier schools.
Dr Sonneveld would be working with David Sabiston from the Napier Health Services Advocacy Committee and Tamatea Intermediate students would be the first to benefit from her wisdom.
The vast majority of people with skin cancer were in their 40s and older but it was never too early to make people aware of the dangers of too much sun worshipping.
She acknowledged that preaching to young people about how bad their skin would look in their 60s would be difficult.
Most young people, and her daughter was one of them, could not contemplate that far away.
However the reality was that she cut off 10 skin cancers a week, and Hawke's Bay people were more at risk than other Kiwis because of the region's sunny climate.
To combat the effects people needed to regularly apply sun screen (with a sun protection factor of +15) and cover up with a hat, shirt and sunglasses, even at this time of year, but especially in the summer months, Dr Sonneveld said.
Moles also needed to be checked by a GP, no matter how long they had been there or how harmless they looked.
"It is not always the big black mole that is the melanoma."