E-Malt.com News article: Russia: Alcohol causes 43% of working-age men deaths

Drinking beer and wine to excess and consuming cologne, medical tinctures and cleaning agents as a cheaper source of alcohol accounted for 43 percent of deaths among Russia's working-age men, a study says, according to Bloomberg, June 15.

Researchers studied 1,750 men who died between 2003 and 2005 as well as the same number of control cases who were still alive, according to the study, published today in the medical journal The Lancet.

Russian men are more likely to drink products such as cologne or cleaning agents not meant for consumption because they are as much as six times cheaper than alcohol meant to be drunk, the scientists, led by David Leon of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Health, wrote in the paper.

``Our analyses provide indirect support for the contention that the sharp fluctuations seen in Russian mortality in the early 1990s could be related to hazardous drinking as indicated by consumption of non-beverage alcohol,'' the researchers said.

Men who drank either large amounts of alcoholic beverages or non-beverage alcohol were six times more likely to die younger than men who didn't drink at all or didn't have a drinking problem. Men who drank only alcohol not meant for consumption were nine times as likely to die prematurely, the study says.

The research is limited by the fact that people who drink alcohol not meant for consumption often live in poor housing conditions and have poor diets, Juergen Rehm of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and Gerhard Gmel of the Schweizerische Fachstelle fuer Alkohol und andere Drogenprobleme in Lausanne, Switzerland, wrote in a comment.

The study also didn't track illegally produced alcohol, which is widely consumed in Russia, Rehm and Gmel said.


15 June, 2007