A study from the World Health Organization reveals that alcohol is responsible for 5% of deaths worldwide

Alcohol is responsible for more than one in 20 deaths worldwide, according to the latest edition of a World Health Organization (WHO) report published every four years.

The Guardian writes that the report revealed that about three million deaths in 2016 can be attributed to alcohol, including 2.3 million men and 29% of injuries (including car accidents and suicides) rather than health problems.

Other causes of death included digestive disorders (21%) and cardiovascular diseases (19%), as well as "infectious diseases, cancers, mental disorders" and other conditions caused by alcohol consumption, added CNN.

According to WHO data, about 7.2% of premature deaths worldwide are related to alcohol and 5.3% of all deaths in general.

The Guardian wrote that the WHO expert, Dr. Vladimir Poznyak, said that governments are not doing enough to reduce the consumption of alcohol:

A WHO expert on the fight against alcoholism, Dr. Vladimir Poznyak, who participated in the report, said the burden of alcohol on health was "unacceptable".

"Unfortunately, the implementation of the most effective policy options is lagging behind the scale of the problems," he said, adding that projections suggested that alcohol consumption worldwide would increase over the next few years. to come up.

"Governments must do more to achieve global goals and reduce the burden of alcohol on societies, it is clear, and this action is absent or insufficient in most countries of the world," he said. Mr. Poznyak.

CNN wrote that the survey estimated that 2.3 billion people worldwide consume alcohol, including 237 million men and 46 million women suffering from alcohol-related disorders. The study also found that spirits make up the highest percentage of alcohol consumed (45%), with beer (34%) and wine (12%) declining.

In the four years since the last edition of the study, the proportion of alcohol-related deaths has decreased slightly from 5.9%.

"Over the past decade, there has been a consistent reversal of the association of alcohol consumption with the disease, emphasizing that moderate consumption has a net beneficial effect on health and that called the culture of excessive alcohol consumption ", the epidemiologist of the University of Cambridge, Steven Bell, told CNN.

A huge study recently published in the Lancet concluded that, despite a long-held popular impression (including in the medical community) that moderate consumption of alcohol can be beneficial to health, the benefits I & # 39; far outweigh the benefits.

The lead author of this study, Max Griswold, told Gizmodo, "We have found that there is no real benefit to drinking for your health … The safest level, from the health point of view , do not consume at all.

According to this study, drinking two alcoholic drinks a day increases the risk of premature death by seven percent.

According to the Guardian, Poznyak believes that the WHO study underestimates the drawbacks of alcohol because it does not include data on children who start drinking before the age of 15. .

[Guardian/CNN]