All death records in Australia during the period 1964–1985 were analyzed to compare mortality from melanoma in immigrants and Australian-born individuals, and to investigate changes in risk in the immigrants according to their duration of stay and age at arrival. About 450, 000 deaths were from cancer, and risks of melanoma were estimated by logistic regression relative to those of the Australian-born, with deaths from other cancers used as controls. Estimates were adjusted for age at death, time period, birth cohort, and state of registration of death in Australia. Region of birth was defined as New Zealand, other Oceania, England, Ireland/Scotland/Wales (including Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland), Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Western Asia, or Eastern Asia, bearing in mind that many migrants born in Asia were of European descent. Overall, migrants from outside Oceania were at lower risk than the Australian-born, and the lowest risks in males were in Southern Europeans and Eastern Asians, reflecting the protective effect of a darker complexion. Risk of melanoma was related both to duration of stay in Australia and to age at arrival; although their relative importance cannot be measured, the patterns of change suggested that childhood migration may be more important in determining risk than number of years in Australia. The authors believe this study to be based on the largest data set ever used in migrant studies, and note that the previously found differences in melanoma risk between immigrants and Australian-born remained after adjustment for major temporal and geographic confounders. The results confirm the importance of the interaction between environmental and genetic risk factors in the etiology of melanoma. Am J Epidemiol 1992; 135: 1103–13

Objective: To review studies on the morbidity, mortality and nutrition of migrant populations in France.Design: A systematic search of the bibliographic database Medline, and direct contact with associations and institutions concerned with migrants' health.Results: In France, as in other host countries, migrants belong to the lowest socio-economic strata. They have on average better health and lower mortality than the local-born population. Health benefits are particularly noticeable in Mediterranean men, especially for affluence-related diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases. North African men smoke as heavily as the local-born of the same occupational categories, and yet their mortality rates from lung cancer are notably lower. Such a paradox may be the result of a synergy between different phenomena such as the selection of the fittest applicants for immigration and the maintenance of healthy lifestyles from the countries of origin. In contrast, migrant women do not enjoy the same health advantages, possibly because they are less likely to be selected on the basis of their health and because they are often non-working. Adult migrants from southern Europe and North Africa report dietary practices consistent with the typical Mediterranean diet, which is renowned for its positive effects on health.Conclusions: The diet of Mediterranean adults living in France may partly explain the low rates of chronic diseases and high adult life expectancy observed in migrant men from northern Africa. Information about their diets might provide clues for the design of nutritional education campaigns aimed at low-income people.

Background and objectives: Health selection into unemployment may be either direct or operate by reference to health-related behaviours rather than health per se (indirect selection). Panel data are desirable to investigate selection effects, and the two types of selection processes may be concurrent. We examine jointly the roles of health and health-related behaviours as precursors of unemployment, in order to disentangle direct from indirect selection processes. Design: The data of a multi-round nationally representative health survey in France were analysed longitudinally, based on three data collection rounds: 1992–5, 1996–8 and 2000–2. Following employees salaried in the private sector and aged 30–54 years at baseline, we explored through logistic regression the influence of non-optimal self-rated health, smoking and obesity on the risk of being found unemployed 4 years later. Results: After adjustment for self-rated health, obesity was found to be a significant precursor of unemployment in women, and heavy smoking had that role in men. After adjustment for smoking and obesity, poor health at baseline was found to be a significant precursor of unemployment in both genders. Conclusion: Those findings confirm the intrinsic role of poor health and of health-related behaviours as precursors of unemployment, with gender-specific patterns for the latter. Public policy prescriptions regarding employees’ protection from job insecurities should integrate appropriate accommodations of health limitations, and the personal factors underlying unfavourable work and health behaviours should be investigated, in order to thwart indirect selection phenomena.