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Cook Islands top doctor surprised by binge drinking rating
– Reported, July 26 2014
Reports have emerged from a number of news sources citing data from the World Health Organisation, that nearly half of all men and one fifth of all women binge drink at least once a week, more than in Ireland, Russia or Australia.
WHO defines binging as consuming six or more standard drinks on a single occasion.
Cook Islands’ Director of Public Health Dr Rengi Fariu is surprised by the reports, mainly because the last official survey occurred 10 years ago. He says efforts have since been made to curb the drinking problem.
The last survey we had on alcohol was way back in 2004. Then about 74 percent of people who drank, that is men and about 50 percent of women said that they were drinking, these are people who drink, it varies from one to or more than five standard drinks at each time.
And so again, if you look at their population, it’s around about 15,000 now and out of those we have 3,000 tourists at any one time, and they also have a big population of foreign workers, around about 2,000 or 2,500 and so if you take away 5,000 from that 10,000, we are left with, from 15,000, we are left with 10,000 Indigenous population.
And yeah, again we are not sure about this comment by World Health Organisation and how did they work it out. Yeah, but there is binge drinking going on in the Cook Islands.
On the one hand, there is a suspicion that perhaps Cook Islands is being unfairly maligned, but on the other, maybe there is a serious problem that needs to be addressed regardless.
We are addressing the problem, we have just lobbied government to increase the tax on alcohol. Our Police Department is working very hard in terms of health education and educating the public on safe drinking. We are banning drinking from certain public areas and we are also working on stopping government from the Alcohol Licensing Board, from giving licences to sports club and other cultural activities that happens now and then. So there are a lot of work going into that.
But yes, it is very difficult to tell whether the drinking is the Indigenous population or where there’s a combination of the tourists that are, we have an increasing population of tourists that are coming in and also the number of foreign workers that we are having.
CREDITS:
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au