WHO’s Next? –
Sept. 22, 2018 – CNN wrote that the survey estimated 2.3 billion people across the planet consume alcohol, of whom some 237 million men and 46 million women have some type of disorder with a causal link to alcohol. The study also found that spirits constitute the highest percentage of alcohol consumed (45 percent), with beer (34 percent) and wine (12 percent) falling behind. In the four years since the previous edition of the study, however, the proportion of deaths linked to alcohol dropped slightly from 5.9 percent. “In the last decade or so, there has been a steady reversal in thinking regarding the association of alcohol consumption with disease, specifically focused on challenging the preconception that moderate drinking has a net beneficial effect on health, and large efforts made to counteract the so-called binge drinking culture,” University of Cambridge epidemiologist Steven Bell told CNN. An enormous study recently published in the Lancet concluded that despite a longstanding popular impression (including in the medical community) that moderate alcohol consumption may be good for health, any gains are more than outweighed by the harms.
