Roving Periscope: ‘No safe limit for alcohol drinking’, says WHO
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Ten days after the New Year, 2023, kicked off—when liquor consumption worldwide is reported to be the maximum in a year—the World Health Organization (WHO) has said drinking alcohol is risky and there is no safe limit for its consumption for health.
At least 200 million people in Europe alone are at risk of having alcohol-related cancers, it said.
The global health watchdog had found that alcohol causes at least seven types of cancer, including the most common cancer types, like cancers of the bowel and female breast. It is also linked with esophagus, liver, and colorectal cancers.
There is no safe limit to alcohol consumption and any amount of drinking can severely impact one’s health, according to a WHO statement in The Lancet Public Health journal, the media reported on Wednesday.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified alcohol along with asbestos, radiation, and tobacco, as a high-risk Group 1 carcinogen, contributing to cancer worldwide.
Alcohol causes cancer through biological mechanisms as the compound breaks down in the body, which means that any beverage containing alcohol, regardless of its price and quality, poses a risk of developing cancer.
In the WHO European Region where cancer is the leading cause of death, light to moderate alcohol consumption, that is less than 20 grams of pure alcohol every day, resulted in 23,000 new cancer cases in 2017, constituting half of all alcohol-associated cancers, and approximately 50 percent of these were female breast cancers, the statement said.
“Currently available evidence cannot indicate the existence of a threshold at which the carcinogenic effects of alcohol ‘switch on’ and start to manifest in the human body,” WHO said. A safe level of alcohol consumption can only be defined if there is scientific evidence to prove that at or below the level, there is “no risk of illness or injury.”
WHO said there are no studies to show the potential benefits of alcohol on cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes outweigh the risk of cancer. Still, there is evidence to believe heavy episodic drinking increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases.
“Potential protective effects of alcohol consumption, suggested by some studies, are tightly connected with the comparison groups chosen and the statistical methods used, and may not consider other relevant factors,” said Jurgen Rehm, member of the WHO Regional Director for Europe’s Advisory Council for Noncommunicable Diseases.
The study also found the WHO’s European Region has the highest alcohol consumption level with over 200 million people at risk of having alcohol-attributed cancer. Amongst them, the vulnerable and disadvantaged population is more at risk because of the quality of alcohol they consume.
“Although it is well established that alcohol can cause cancer, this fact is still not widely known to the public in most countries,” said Carina Ferreira-Borges, acting Unit Lead for Noncommunicable Disease Management and Regional Advisor for Alcohol and Illicit Drugs in the WHO Regional Office for Europe.
She also advocated the publication of cancer-related health information messages on labels of alcoholic beverages, as in the case of tobacco products.
