Alcohol's effect on people's health, behaviour and safety

Main Category: Alcohol / Addiction / Illegal Drugs
Article Date: 23 Jul 2004 - 16:00 PDT

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As inroads are finally being made into smoking rates, so attention is swinging towards the effect that alcohol has on people's health, behaviour and safety. And the picture is not a pretty one. According to the government's alcohol harm reduction strategy for England, published in March, excess alcohol costs England alone £20bn a year, with alcohol-related injuries and illness costing the health service £2bn annually.

Alcohol is a feature in 50 per cent of all reported crimes and a third of all domestic violence incidents. It is implicated in 22,000 premature deaths each year, 1,000 suicides and 17 million lost working days.

There are two main types of drinking that are a cause for concern - binge drinking and chronic drinking. Binge drinkers tend to be under 25, while chronic drinkers tend to be 30 or over. These two groups are the main targets of the alcohol strategy, which aims to tackle alcohol-related disorder and health problems and to provide better information for people about alcohol misuse while clamping down on the irresponsible promotion of drinking.

The strategy highlights binge drinkers as being more likely to be men, although women's drinking has been rising fast over the last 10 years. A new study carried out in the US found that binge drinking might cause the type of brain damage usually associated with people undergoing treatment for alcoholism.

The research, undertaken at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and the University of California in San Francisco, found that people who drank more than 100 alcohol units a month suffered from brain damage which led to memory loss, impaired mental function and lowered intelligence.

Crime and disorder are obvious consequences of excess alcohol consumption that also have a heavy impact on health services. Binge drinkers are most at risk of accidents and alcohol poisoning, risk being a victim of violence or sexual assault, and are more likely to commit violence.

Up to 70 per cent of all admissions to accident and emergency are likely to be alcohol-related. Johnathan Shepherd, professor of oral and maxillo-facial surgery at University Hospital, Cardiff, has spent 15 years researching public health and criminology. It was the high incidence of alcohol-related injuries that were being treated in hospital that first sparked his concern.

'About one-in-ten assault victims treated in the NHS is hit with a glass,' he says. 'They are as common as knife wounds, and glass bottles are everywhere - they litter the street late at night and they are the objects to hand. In terms of a threat to life, it's never as bad as a knife, but the face is the target and people end up scarred for life. We have been calling for a shift from glass bottles to plastic bottles. It's an easily understood and achievable objective in urban centre licensed premises. A few years ago there was a shift to toughen glasses and now we are calling for plastic bottles.' CONTINUES.......Public Health News, UK