Word: alcoholic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...deaths around the world is caused by alcohol consumption, and booze is now as damaging to global health as tobacco was a decade ago, according to a new study in the British medical journal the Lancet...
...last global statistical analysis of the damage caused by alcohol, undertaken in 2000, found that 3.2% of deaths worldwide were the result of alcohol consumption. The new study, part of the Lancet's "Alcohol and Global Health" series published last Saturday, used the same statistical tools as the previous one, and found that for 2004 the figure had increased 0.6%. Alcohol-related causes of death include accidents, violence, poisoning, mouth and throat cancer, colorectal cancer, breast cancer, suicide, stroke and many others. (See how to prevent illness...
Lead author Jürgen Rehm of the University of Toronto tells TIME that the increase was primarily the result of more women taking up drinking. He says the increase in the rate of alcohol-related deaths is particularly troubling because the researchers took into account the cardiovascular benefits of moderate drinking and because the majority of the world's population currently abstains from alcohol. But that is likely to change as India and China become wealthier and their citizens find themselves with more disposable income, he says. That, in turn, is likely to further increase the death rate unless...
...example of how damaging alcohol abuse can be, a separate study in the Lancet found that drinking caused more than half of the deaths among adult Russians between 1990 and 2001, in the unstable years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. That study of some 60,000 residents in three Russian cities found excess mortality (i.e., a larger than expected number of people dying from a certain disease) not only with obvious alcohol-related illnesses such as liver cancer but also tuberculosis and pneumonia, which the study's authors say may be partly a result of weak immunity caused...
Globally, average alcohol consumption per person is the equivalent of about 1.6 gallons (6.2 liters) of pure ethanol a year, or about 12 units a week. Annual consumption per person was found to be highest in Europe, where it equals 3.1 gallons (11.9 liters) of ethanol (21.5 units a week). That compares with 2.5 gallons (9.4 liters) a year (18 units a week) in North America and 0.2 gallons (0.7 liters) a year (1.3 units a week) in the eastern Mediterranean, which has the lowest levels. Those figures, according to Rehm's study, mean that "globally, the effect of alcohol...