Alcohol one of 3 top
killers in world
Press release issued
recently by The Lancet:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=19633
Alcohol: Global Burden
on Health Similar to Tobacco and High Blood Pressure
04 Feb 2005
The amount of death
and disability caused by alcohol globally is similar to that caused
by tobacco and high blood pressure, concludes a review in The Lancet
(Vol. 365 No. 9458, Feb. 5, 2005). Overall, four percent of the
global burden of disease is attributable to alcohol, 4.1% to tobacco
and 4.4% to high blood pressure. Alcohol is causally related to
more than 60 different medical conditions, including breast cancer
and coronary heart disease. In most cases alcohol has a detrimental
effect on health.
The comprehensive review
on alcohol and public health is particularly timely as from February
7, 2005 new legislation in the UK will permit pubs, bars, off-licences
and nightclubs to remain open 24 hours later this year.
In the review, Robin
Room (Stockholm University, Sweden) Thomas Babor (University of
Connecticut, USA) and Jürgen Rehm (Centre for Addiction and
Mental Health, Canada) assess policy research and options for alcohol
control. Studies have shown that raising the price and reducing
the availability of alcoholic beverages can lower consumption. Using
price elasticity estimates and analysis of UK alcohol related mortality
data the authors estimate that a 10% rise in British alcohol prices
would produce a drop in cirrhosis mortality of 7% in men and 8.3%
in women and a fall of 28.8% in men and 37.4% in women in deaths
from explicitly alcoholinvolved causes (alcohol dependence, poisoning
etc.) Besides price, drinking and alcoholrelated problems can be
affected by restricting the hours and days of alcohol purchasing
and of the numbers and types of outlets. Despite this evidence the
authors highlight the fact that research findings on effective alcohol
control measures fail to impact on policy decisions.
Professor Room comments:
“A stark discrepancy exists between research findings about
the effectiveness of alcohol control measures and the policy options
considered by most governments. In many places, the interests of
the alcohol industry have effectively exercised a veto over policies,
making sure that the main emphasis is on ineffective strategies
such as education.”
He concludes: “There
has been a growing contrast between the treatment of alcohol in
trade agreements and disputes as an ordinary commodity and the more
restrictive treatment of such other commodities as tobacco and pharmaceuticals,
which also entail a public health risks. In a globalising world
of common markets and trade agreements, alcohol policy is thus no
longer only a national or subnational matter. To reverse the trend,
a new international agreement on alcohol control, along the lines
of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control is needed.”
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