A SKIN cancer survivor is begging young women not to die for the sake of a tan after it was revealed that the disease is the top cancer killer among twentysomething females.

As the temperature heats up and the sun becomes stronger, Eileen Bentley wants sun worshippers to be aware that sunbathing without proper protection is a deadly hobby.

She said: “I see people coming back from a day at the beach who are red raw. People don’t cover up – they just want to get tanned and they go about it the wrong way.

“A tan still seems to be the look that most young women want.”

Nationally, around 340 women in their 20s were diagnosed with malignant melanoma in a year.

Overall the disease kills around 1,800 people every year but rates are expected to rise and statisticians predict that malignant melanoma will be the fourth most common cancer for men and women of all ages by 2024.

Latest available statistics from 2005 show that in Dorset 114 women were diagnosed with malignant melanoma and 12 women died from the disease.

In the same year, Dorset saw 129 new cases of melanoma of the skin. This compares to 318 cases in Hampshire, 113 in Gloucestershire and 33 in Wiltshire. There were a total of 30 deaths across Dorset due to melanoma of the skin in 2005.

Mrs Bentley, 77, of Bridport, developed an early form of non-melanoma skin cancer that she believes was caused by gardening in the sun. She was exposed to UV rays in the gap between the bottom of her trousers and her feet.

Mrs Bentley said: “It was only when I was older that I realised I needed to apply suncream. When I was a child we’d run around in the garden and I used to get little blisters on my legs and my mother used to paint them with iodine.”

Mrs Bentley had a mole removed and was given the all clear. She is now extra vigilant when it comes to checking moles. She said: “My husband does a good check of me because I have a lot of brown spots.

“He has a special magnifying glass to go over them with.”

Jo Allum, a clinical nurse specialist for skin cancer, takes phonecalls from people from West Dorset who have concerns about skin cancer.

She said: “With younger people, and especially women, a lot of them still think it’s a tan that makes them sexy.

“A lot of them run around with hardly a stitch on. Years ago we would never have been exposing that much skin.”