Sun-cream war smears good names

With so much conflict in the world, news of a war breaking out close to home is easily overlooked. But here on these shores, with winter still to breathe its last, a sun tan conflagration rages.

Since the bloody combatants are two charities, the Cancer Research Campaign (CRC) and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF), we should fear the worst. Civil wars are particularly nasty, with few prisoners taken and high casualties.

Skirmishing began when both organisations came up with the same idea: to produce creams to prevent skin cancer.

It’s a sound business proposition with an enviably attractive marketing strategy. First, create demand by issuing stark warnings about the cancerous properties of sunshine, then move on to supply the solution. The Health Education Authority could profitably follow suit by marketing its own brand of low cholesterol, cream-bun-flavoured condoms.

But inside every good idea there is an argument about who thought of it first. War broke out when the CRC announced its own “exclusive SPF 20 brand” of protection cream. Stung by this pre-emptive strike, ICRF rushed out an announcement declaring that it will be the first to develop its own product.

Sharron Benaich, ICRF’s director of buying, denies her organisation has committed a hostile act. “We have a range of six products which have taken months and months of development,” she says. “It is obvious we are not announcing ours today to spite the CRC.”

But what was obvious to Benaich was less evident to her opposite number at CRC, Susan Osborne, who fired off a salvo: “It has taken us 18 months to plan this launch with a press conference with full details, speakers and a video.”

As if that were not enough to force a retreat, she tossed in a devastating hand grenade. “I understand,” she says witheringly, “that ICRF has only a press release.”

That may yet prove a knockout blow. When market research is gathered from behind enemy lines it is expected to show that nine out of ten people would prefer to ward off skin cancer with a product launched by a press conference with full details, speakers, and a video, rather than use an alternative brought into this world with no greater ceremony than a press release.

It’s a damned ugly business, war. However, both the front-line generals in this battle may console themselves with the thought that, by virtue of being female, they will hang on to their brain cells for longer.

Professor Ruben Gur, of the University of Pennsylvania, has discovered that although men begin life with larger brains on average than women, they lose cerebral tissue at almost three times the rate of females, particularly in the part of the brain responsible for abstract reasoning, mental flexibility, and impulse control.

So, were the sun tan wars being conducted by men of a similar age to Benaich and Osborne, the outcome would be even dottier, with the CRC recklessly hurling in more and more speakers, details and videos, and the ICRF responding with a barrage of commas and semi-colons.

Small wonder that Gur maintains that, in evolutionary terms, the reason male brains burn out faster is that “men are more dispensable”. Pitiably, men struggle to maintain their mental dexterity by sustaining high metabolic rates in what little tissue they have left, but to no effect. Indeed, they only make things worse.

“Women survive at least a decade longer than men,” says the professor. “And part of the reason could be that what happens when you overdrive cells is that you get cell-killing effects.”

Life as a post-feminist man, never entirely congenial, is made insupportable by the knowledge that your brains are fast dying off and you are unwittingly accelerating the process by unconsciously trying to combat it. Compared with brain cells going belly up by the day, a touch of skin cancer is mere bagatelle. But nowhere in the small print will you find anything that says life is fair.

Take sperm. For some reason, British and Danish men have only half the sperm count of Finns. But instead of congratulating the Finns, who, let’s face it, have little else to get excited about, the European Community is determined to conduct a two-year study into the supposed deficiencies of British and Danish manhood.

There is cause to smell a rat here. First, history has taken a wayward course when an organisation set up from a free trade area takes it into its head to count the sperm of certain member countries. There is nothing in the Treaty of Rome, nor in any subsequent directive, to evoke the concept of Euro semen. But there is more to this than incongruity. Why do you suppose the Brits and Danes are being singled out for this humiliating study? Cast your mind back to Maastricht. Who made the greatest waves when that preposterous treaty was being imposed? Why, the Brits and Danes, of course.

Are we really to believe that the Spanish, French, Dutch, Italians, Irish, Austrians, Greeks, Germans, Portuguese, and, heaven help us, the Luxembourgers, are richer in seminal fluid than the nation that won two world wars and is the Mother of Parliaments? Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Kohl?