Alcohol: A Global Health Problem
Reported February 4, 2005
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — Alcohol ranks right up there with smoking and high blood pressure when it comes to causing death and disability, report investigators who reviewed research conducted on alcohol and public health.
The multinational team of authors, including an investigator from the University of Connecticut in Farmington, attribute 4 percent of the global disease burden to drinking. Smoking accounts for 4.1 percent, while high blood pressure is responsible for 4.4 percent.
Unfortunately, researchers continue, alcohol doesn’t get the same attention for its link to death and disability as smoking does with most countries failing to take measures that could really impact the total consumption of alcohol including raising prices, reducing the availability of alcoholic beverages, and developing programs to reduce drunk driving. Cracking down on drinking in Great Britain by hiking prices by just 10 percent, for example, could reduce alcohol-related deaths among men by nearly 29 percent and among women by about 37 percent.
The authors also call for greater emphasis to be placed on the treatment of alcohol-related problems using proven behavioral and pharmacological interventions, but emphasize the real road to success in battling alcohol-related death and disability lies in better public policy.
They write, “Despite the scientific advances, alcohol problems continue to present a major challenge to medicine and public health, in part because population-based public health approaches have been neglected in favor of approaches oriented to the individual that tend to be more palliative than preventative.”
SOURCE: The Lancet, 2005;365:519-536