www.alkoholpolitik.ch

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Several hundred concerned citizens and people with developmental disabilities marched Friday on the state Capitol in support of raising the alcohol tax to help fund services they need.
The dime-a-drink legislation would raise an estimated $215 million. Maryland alcohol taxes are among the lowest in the nation, and the legislation has wide support. (Source: Google Alcohol News, 02/12/11) wbaltv.com, 02/12/11 our Online-Comment: Those critical to a tax rise on alcohol should remember that they are paying a life long without beeing asked the awful amount of alcohol related social costs each year with taxes and insurance premiums. If alcohol taxes could reduce alcohol consumption the total burden of alcohol related harm would decrease too. Therefor higher alcohol taxes are a good investment, especially for moderate consumers.

…AIDS Second
Today the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that alcohol is to blame for just about 4% of, or 2.5 million deaths worldwide annually. Alcohol attributable injuries are of a growing concern to the public health community, with alcohol-related injuries such as road traffic accidents, burns, poisonings, falls and drownings making up more than a third of the disease burden attributable to alcohol consumption. AIDS was a close second with 2.1 milion deaths in 2009.
Yet alcohol control policies are weak and remain a low priority for most governments despite drinking’s heavy toll on society from road accidents, violence, disease, child neglect and job absenteeism. … (Source: Medical News Today, 02/11/11) WHO: Global status report on alcohol and health analyses our Online-Comment: For those persons who don’t like them, figures from other sources are always incorrect. But nobody can deny that governments do not care enough about them. And that is the main sorrow of the WHO. The alcohol industry could not hinder that in May 2010 the WHO General Assembly accepted a resolution on a global alcohol strategy. Now it puts pressure on the national governments that they don’t implement the proposals in their legislation. The civil societies come off a loser.

Alcohol abuse is killing 2.5 million people each year and governments must do more to prevent it, the World Health Organization said Friday.
Some 4 percent of all deaths worldwide are attributable to alcohol, the U.N. body said. The main causes of alcohol-related deaths are injuries incurred when drunk, cancer, liver cirrhosis, heart disease and strokes.
„It’s a killer and it’s not good from a public health point of view,“ Melvin Freeman of South African’s Ministry of Health and a contributor to the report, told reporters in Geneva.
Worldwide, over 6 percent of male deaths are related to alcohol, but only just over 1 percent of deaths in women. Almost one in 10 deaths among young people aged 15-to-29 is from alcohol-related causes — about 320,000 each year — WHO said. (Source: Google Alcohol News, 02/11/11) Washington Examiner: 02/11/11

by Sally Casswell in The Lancet, 02/05/11
It was heartening to read of the forthcoming UN high-level meeting on chronic non-communicable diseases and the excellent strategic analysis by Robert Geneau and colleagues (Nov 13, p 1689),1 which addressed the links between chronic disease and poverty and the reasons for inaction.
As Geneau and colleagues‘ Series paper states, alcohol (a fast-growing risk factor in the populous, disproportionately young countries with growing economies) is a contributor to important chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease, cancer, and tuberculosis. It therefore qualifies for attention in this forum because of its contribution to premature mortality, the basis on which Geneau and colleagues suggest that resource allocation should be made. However, alcohol differs somewhat from other risk factors mentioned in the Series in that its contribution to the global burden of disease and injury is, in large part, via its effect on morbidity (injury from violence and motor vehicle crashes, alcohol dependence, and depression). Much of the effect is in young people, and disability-adjusted life-years are equivalent to those of tobacco globally.