Word: rehm
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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...
...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 on the burden of disease is about the same size as that of smoking in 2000." In fact, despite the prevalence of tobacco use in the developing world, the study shows alcohol as the No. 1 risk factor in 27 emerging...
...article did include a hopeful caveat to this dire picture, however. As Rehm says, "We [now] know more than ever about which strategies can effectively control alcohol-related harms." The most cost-effective of these methods, he says, is simply to raise the price of alcohol. There's already evidence that this works. In France and Italy, for example, alcohol consumption has steadily plummeted over the past 25 years as the price of drinks has gone up relative to income compared with other countries. "Despite all stereotypes, Italy now has the lowest consumption of any European country," Rehm says...
...Rehm also says that governments put too much faith in treatment programs for alcoholics as a way of combating excessive alcohol consumption. "If you start pumping money into treatment systems, that's helpful for those with alcohol-abuse disorders, but that group is a very small minority of those who suffer as a result of alcohol," he says. "If you die of alcohol-related breast cancer, you may never have been an alcoholic, but still it's an alcohol-related disease...
...Rehm adds that while an end to deaths and disability caused by alcohol is in sight, it is a frustratingly difficult goal to reach. "The solution can only be to reduce the overall amount of drinking," he says. "But that's pretty hard to do - to get humanity to learn to drink one or two units a day, and never more...