Cancer charity Macmillan Cancer Support has launched toolkit called "Talking About Cancer" to help inform children about the lethal disease of cancer and its causes.

The cancer charity stressed that the unawareness among children about cancer must be addressed to help them evade avoidable health issues later in life.

The toolkit was launched as the charity found in a survey that children are unaware of what causes cancer. In a survey of 501 school children in the age group of 9 to 16 years, the charity found that 97 per cent of children did not know that sunburn can cause cancer, while 9 per cent were unaware that smoking causes cancer.

Four per cent of the children were found believing that one can get cancer from someone else, while 2 per cent said that they could be infected with the disease if they behave badly.

More than a fifth (21 per cent) of children believed that cancer was always lethal, and more than half (52 per cent) did not even know what cancer was.

Commenting on the figures, Katherine Donnelly from Macmillan Cancer Support said, "The unknown is always scary and, as our survey has shown, cancer is something school children don't know a lot about."

Meanwhile, Macmillan Cancer Support is organizing World's Biggest Coffee Morning in the Beverley area to raise funds to support cancer-affected people in the area.