THE family of a British woman who died from skin cancer after using a sunbed once a week is calling for the tanning machines to be banned in the UK.
Mother-of-eight Teresa Zawadzki, 31, died six months after visiting a doctor with a large mole on her leg, the Daily Express reports.
She was told she had cancer, which had spread to her lungs and her spine, and a course of radiotherapy and chemotherapy failed to beat the disease.
“She never sunbathed outside, she didn’t like it, but she had a sunbed in the house,” her mother Ellen Zawadzki, 51, said.
“She used it no more than once a week, but obviously even that can have an affect.”
“If that amount of use can cause skin cancer, then these things need to be outlawed.”
Cancer specialists said UK government plans to ban only under-18s from using sunbeds from next April do not go far enough, with campaigners and the British Medical Association recommending stricter regulations to limit their use among adults.
In Australia, most states moved to ban minors from using tanning beds, and increased industry regulation, following the well-publicised plight of Melbourne woman Claire Oliver who died of melanoma in 2007 at age 26.
There are now more skin cancer deaths in the UK each year than in Australia.
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