Alcohol seen killing 200,000 Britons in next 20 yrs

LONDON - Up to 210,000 people in England and Wales will be killed prematurely by alcohol over the next 20 years, with a third of those preventable deaths due to liver disease alone, health experts warned on Monday.

Other alcohol-related deaths will be due to accidents, violence and suicide, or from chronic diseases such as high blood pressure, strokes, heart disease and cancer, the experts warned in a projection study in the Lancet medical journal.

Yet Ian Gilmore, former president of the Royal College of Physicians and one of the lead authors of the work, said it was "entirely within the power of the UK government" to take steps to tackle Britain's drink problem and "prevent the worst-case scenario of avoidable deaths".

The experts pointed to measures taken in the former Soviet Union in the 1980s, which they said saw alcohol consumption fall by a third in two years with a resulting 12 percent drop in the rate of alcohol-related deaths.

The warning comes after British Prime Minister David Cameron promised last week to crack down on excessive drinking, calling it a "scandal" that costs the taxpayer-funded National Health System an estimated 2.7 billion pounds ($4.3 billion) a year.

Alcohol abuse and the harmful health effects of heavy or binge drinking are not only a British problem, but take their toll in many other mainly wealthy nations around the world.

A study last week found that 7.5 million children in the United States - more than 10 percent of child population - live with an alcoholic parent and are at increased risk of developing a host of health problems of their own.  

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), some 2.5 million people die each year from the harmful use of alcohol, accounting for about 3.8 percent of all deaths worldwide.

Steps to curb alcohol use feature three times in the WHO's top 10 "best buys" for public health policies to reduce the burden of chronic diseases, which kill 36 million people a year worldwide.