AL COHOL POISONING

The word “intoxicated” comes from “toxic.”

Alcohol poisoning kills 2,200 Americans a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It works this way:

Alcohol depresses the action of nerves that control involuntary actions such as breathing and the gag reflex. If you drink faster than your liver can break down the alcohol, the blood alcohol level rises and breathing can simply stop.

Also, alcohol causes an upset stomach and sometimes vomiting. A person who is unconscious, and whose gag reflex is depressed, may choke.

There’s another danger that is not as widely known: After a drinker passes out and appears to be sleeping it off peacefully, his or her blood alcohol concentration can keep rising. This is because alcohol in the stomach and intestine continues to enter the bloodstream, which means danger can actually increase.

The CDC also singles out women, the group where binge drinking is accelerating over the past two decades: “The risk of cirrhosis and other alcohol-related liver diseases is higher for women than for men,” it says. And it raises the risk of breast cancer, as well as throat, esophagus and liver cancers in both sexes.

In 2013, the CDC reported that “Binge drinking is reported by one in eight U.S. adult women and one in five high school girls. Women who binge drink tend to do so frequently and with high intensity. Most high school girls who reported current alcohol use also reported binge drinking.”

Bingeing is most common among women aged 18 to 24.