‘India’s per capita alcohol consumption doubles in 11 years’

NEWDELHI: India’s per capita alcohol consumption has more than doubled between 2005 (2.4 litres) and 2016 (5.7 litres), revealed the Global Status Report on Alcohol released on Friday. Of the total consumption, 4.2 litres are consumed by men and 1.5 litres by women.

Globally, the per capita consumption has also risen from 5.5 litres in 2005 to 6.4 litres in 2016, and killed more than 3 million people in 2016.

The report by the World Health Organization (WHO) also says that about 237 million men and 46 million women had alcohol problems, with the highest prevalence in Europe and the Americas.

About one in three deaths from alcohol were because of injuries, including car crashes and self harm.

By 2025, total alcohol per capita consumption (15+ years) is expected to increase in half of the WHO regions, and the highest increase is expected in the Southeast Asia, with an increase of 2.2 litres alone in India that represents a large proportion of the total population in this region.

Close to 2.3 billion people are alcoholics worldwide, and the average daily consumption of alcohol by them is about two glasses of wine, a large bottle of beer or two shots of spirits.

And with the increase in alcohol consumption, its harmful effects are also on the rise.

The rise in alcoholic liver diseases is fast growing in India and, as the name suggests, it is a result of excessive alcohol consumption

over a period of time.

Liver diseases include alcoholic fatty liver, chronic liver disease and liver cirrhosis. Fatty liver is the most common result of excessive alcohol consumption.

The report also suggested that 51.1 men per 100,000 population and 27.1 women per 100,000 population suffered from liver cirrhosis.

Cancers associated with alcohol abuse resulted in 181 men per 100,000 population and 126.4 women per 100,000 population, the report added.

Seventy per cent of the admitted liver disease patients at the Delhi government-run superspeciality Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences (ILBS) suffer from alcoholic liver disease (ALD).

Also, 15% of the liver cancers in the hospital are a result of over consumption of alcohol.

“Twenty years ago, commonest form of liver disease in India was Hepatitis B. See change has happened since then, with people suffering from ALD of the severe type that is not seen even in the west,” said Dr SK Sarin, director, ILBS.