www.alkoholpolitik.ch

A new 6 million pound NHS campaign to reveal alcohol’s hidden effects warns people of the unseen damage caused by regularly drinking more than the advised limits and highlights drinkers’ affected organs while they sup their drink in the pub or at home. The campaign was launched recently by Public Health Minister, Gillian Merron. It forms part of a government-wide strategy to tackle the harmful effects of alcohol and is backed by major health charities. (Source: Medical News Today, 3/1/10) Online-Comment: I have been wondering for some time already why people in the U.K. get the advise to drink double the amount of alcohol as advised in other countries on the continent. Is it the climate or the good relations between alcohol industry and government?

Dear Legislator,
I support AB 1694 — The Alcohol-Related Services Program It’s time for Big Alcohol to pay its fair share of California’s annual $38.4 billion in alcohol-related trauma care, hospitalization, treatment, prevention and criminal justice costs. (Source: Marin Institute, 2/20/10)

Drinking at the last chance saloon…or – there is no place for integrity in academic medicine.
Distinguished voices are lining up behind England’s chief medical officer Liam Donaldson in support of a minimum price for alcohol. The BMA and the Royal College of Physicians have made a good case, and this week they are joined by the combined weight of the Faculty of Public Health and the Royal Society for Public Health. These two bodies list a minimum price for alcohol among 12 policy changes that will save many lives and relieve pressure on the NHS. As the faculty’s president Alan Maryon-Davies says, in lean times such act ion is all the more essential…. (Source: Google Alkohol News, 2/7/10) schiwago.blogspot.com, 2/7/10

CALIFANO CONTINUES AS CHAIRMAN. – The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University announced today that William H. Foster, PhD, Dean of Maine’s Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service, will become President and Chief Executive Officer of CASA on February 28, 2010, succeeding Joseph A. Califano, Jr., the former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare who founded CASA in 1992. Califano will continue to serve as CASA chairman. Foster returns to the University and CASA where he previously served for ten years as senior vice-president and chief operating officer. Source: CASA press release, 1/27/10)