GENEVA: Alcohol kills nearly three million people annually, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday, adding that while the death rate had dropped slightly in recent years it remained “unacceptably high”.

The United Nations health agency’s latest re­port on alcohol and health said alcohol causes nearly one in 20 deaths globally each year, throu­gh drunk driving, alcohol-induced violence and abuse and a multitude of diseases and disorders.

The report said 2.6 million deaths were attributed to alcohol consumption in 2019 — the latest available statistics — accounting for 4.7 per cent of all deaths worldwide that year. Nearly three-quarters of those deaths were in men, it said.

“Substance use severely harms individual health, increasing the risk of chronic diseases, mental health conditions, and tragically resulting in millions of preventable dea­ths every year,” WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. He pointed out that there had been “some reduction in alcohol consumption and related harm worldwide since 2010”.

“[But] the health and social burden due to alcohol use remains unacceptably high,” he continued, highlighting that younger people were disproportionately affected.

The highest proportion of alcohol-attributable deaths in 2019 — 13pc — were among people aged 20 to 39, the WHO said.

Drinking is linked to a slew of health conditions, including cirrhosis of the liver and some cancers. Of all the fatalities it caused in 2019, the report found that an estimated 1.6 million were from noncommunicable diseases.

Of these, 474,000 were from cardiovascular diseases, 401,000 from cancer and a huge 724,000 from injuries, including traffic accidents and self-harm.

Published in Dawn, June 26th, 2024