The new Global status report on alcohol and health 2014 from the WHO has found shocking levels of alcohol consumption across Africa that is resulting in many deaths.
Countries across Africa featured prominently in the global report highlighting the dangerous levels of alcohol consumption. South African drinkers (15+) for example were shown to be consuming a huge 27.1 litres of pure alcohol per year on average. East African countries such as Uganda and Rwanda also featured highly in the levels of alcohol consumed (23.7 and 22.0 respectively).
These levels of alcohol consumption are having far-reaching health consequences.
The report found that globally, harmful use of alcohol causes approximately 3.3 million deaths every year (or 5.9% of all deaths), and 5.1% of the global burden of disease is attributable to alcohol consumption.
These figures mean that alcohol is responsible for more deaths that HIV/AIDS (2.8%), violence (0.9%) or tuberculosis (1.7%) combined!
Patterns of alcohol consumption as well as they type of alcohol consumed were also highlighted as an important issue impacting on African’s health by the report. For example, in Uganda at least 89 per cent of the alcohol consumed in Uganda is unregulated, home brewed and illegally sold.
The report also found that there are significant sex differences in the proportion of global deaths attributable to alcohol, for example, in 2012 7.6% of deaths among males and 4.0% of deaths among females were attributable to alcohol.
This difference between the sexes is an indicator of the difference in drinking patterns between males and females, both in volume of alcohol consumed and in number of heavy drinking occasions. There are also sex differences between alcohol-attributable causes of death. For females, cardiovascular disease categories are most important, while for males injuries are the most common cause of alcohol-attributable deaths.
More information:
- Read the full report by clicking here.
- Read the county profiles by clicking here.
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