Urgent action is needed to protect public health from alcohol industry influence and to curb alcohol-related disease and death, according to international researchers.  

"The alcohol industry has a serious, and dangerous, conflict of interest between its health-related education and policy-influencing activities, and its commercial priorities," they say.

That warning comes in one of a series of reports published this year in Future Healthcare, The Lancet Public Health, Addiction, and other journals, all pointing to the same conclusion: Alcohol is one of the world's leading drivers of preventable disease, yet industry tactics routinely delay or weaken health protections to maximize sales and profits.

The numbers are stark. Alcohol consumption accounted for 2.6 million deaths worldwide in 2019. It was recently shown to increase the risk of developing at least seven types of cancer: mouth, throat, larynx, esophagus, liver, colorectal, and female breast.

The toll also extends far beyond individual drinkers. Like tobacco, the alcohol industry also fuels broad population-level secondhand harms, including injuries and deaths. Those impacts have been substantially underestimated until now due to a lack of data and modern analysis techniques, researchers say this month in The Lancet Public Health. 

For example, a recent U.K. study using advanced methodology to study the global health burden of alcohol found nearly 300,000 deaths from road injuries in 2019 were attributable to alcohol use—far outnumbering prior Global Burden of Disease estimates of 45,400 deaths. 

Intimate partner violence, fetal alcohol syndrome, developmental disorders, and rising rates of mental distress are all tied to alcohol use, affecting millions of people who do not choose to drink. If studies included alcohol-related harm to others, they would be likely to reveal substantially higher burdens for women and children, researchers say.

A global health crisis driven by the drinks industry

While young people and those in Eastern Europe, Central and Southern Sub-Saharan Africa are disproportionately affected by alcohol's harms, researchers stress that the risks are just as pressing in wealthy countries like the U.S., where the number of alcohol-related deaths nearly doubled over the last 25 years.

Most recently in the U.S., drinking rates have hit historic lows as public awareness of alcohol's harms grows. Yet even as consumption declines, the federal government withdrew a long-awaited study about alcohol and its health harms, showing that even one drink a day raises the risk of liver cirrhosis, oral cancer, and esophageal cancer.