Alcohol responsible for one in 20 deaths worldwide

Geneva : Alcohol kills three million people worldwide each year -- more than AIDS, violence and road accidents combined, the World Health Organization said Friday, adding that men are particularly at risk. The UN health agency’s latest report on alcohol and health pointed out that alcohol causes more than one in 20 deaths globally each year, including drink driving, alcohol-induced violence and abuse and a multitude of diseases and disorders.

Men account for more than three quarters of alcohol-related deaths, the nearly 500-page report found. “Far too many people, their families and communities suffer the consequences of the harmful use of alcohol through violence, injuries, mental health problems and diseases like cancer and stroke,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement. “It’s time to step up action to prevent this serious threat to the development of healthy societies,” he added. Drinking is linked to more than 200 health conditions, including liver cirrhosis and some cancers. 

Alcohol abuse also makes people more susceptible to infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV and pneumonia, the report found. The some three million alcohol-related deaths registered globally in 2016 -- the latest available statistics -- account for 5.3pc of all deaths that year. In comparison, HIV/AIDS was responsible for 1.8 per cent of global deaths that year, road injuries for 2.5pc and violence for 0.8pc, the study showed.

The latest numbers are lower than those in WHO’s last report on global alcohol consumption, published in 2014. There are “some positive global trends”, the agency said, pointing to shrinking prevalence of heavy episodic drinking and of alcohol-related deaths since 2010. But it warned that “the overall burden of disease and injuries caused by the harmful use of alcohol is unacceptably high,” especially in Europe and the Americas.