Alcohol kills nearly three million people annually, the World Health Organization 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 drink 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 percent 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 — 13 percent — were among people aged 20 to 39, the WHO said.
