WHO warns global health toll of alcohol remains ‘unacceptably high’

The global health toll of alcohol remains “unacceptably high” across the globe, the World Health Organization said this week.

Despite alcohol’s immense health toll, however, countries are still not deploying tactics that the WHO says would help to reduce alcohol’s devastating health impacts, like access restrictions, special taxes, and prohibitions on certain types of alcohol advertising.

Overall, the agency attributed 2.6 million deaths to alcohol in 2019, representing 4.7% of all deaths worldwide.

“Despite some reduction in the alcohol-related deaths rates since 2010, the overall number of deaths due to alcohol consumption remains unacceptably high,” Vladimir Poznyak, a physician-researcher and WHO official focused on alcohol and drug use, said in a press conference.

Overall consumption rates were highest in the WHO’s European and African regions, Poznyak added, and the death rate per liter of alcohol was highest in low-income countries and lowest in wealthy countries. Overall, men suffered from alcohol-related harms at rates more than three times higher than women.

The WHO’s warning about alcohol came despite a downtick in overall alcohol deaths and in alcohol consumption as well, which decreased slightly between 2010 and 2019 from 5.7 to 5.5 liters per person each year.

Even with the decrease, the WHO estimated that roughly 400 million people, or 7% of people over 15 years old, met the criteria for an alcohol use disorder, and more than half of those 400 million “live with alcohol dependence.”

Of the alcohol-related deaths that occurred in 2019, 1.6 million resulted from noncommunicable diseases like cancer or heart disease and over 700,000 stemmed from injuries including car crashes, violence, and self-harm. Nearly 300,000 stemmed from communicable diseases known to be more prevalent among alcohol drinkers, like HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

Access to treatment, however, remained scant. Among the 154 countries that submitted data for the WHO’s report, rates of people in contact with treatment services ranged from less than 1% to 35%.

While a data lag of several years is typical given the difficulties of collecting information from each WHO member state, Poznyak said the Covid-19 pandemic only heightened those challenges, leading to the uncommon five-year delay before the WHO released its analysis, which is based largely on 2019 data.

The report urged the global community to recommit to a component of the WHO’s Sustainable Development Goals known as Plan 3.5, focused on strengthening prevention and treatment services for alcohol and other drugs.

One positive example of alcohol-related policy interventions, according to Poznyak, was Russia, which he said adopted a number of access-restriction policies roughly a decade ago and soon saw a decrease in per-capita alcohol consumption.

“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,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, said in a statement accompanying the report’s release. “To build a healthier, more equitable society, we must urgently commit to bold actions that reduce the negative health and social consequences of alcohol consumption and make treatment for substance use disorders accessible and affordable.”

STAT’s coverage of chronic health issues is supported by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.