According to the Global Information System on Alcohol and Health (GISAH), the harmful use of alcohol results in the death of 2.5 million people annually.
University Lecturer in Global Health Politics, Dr Devi Sridhar, called for the World Health Organisation to put policies in place to regulate alcohol consumption on a global level.
Dr Devi Sridhar, who is a member of World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Health Industry and Associate Fellow at Chatham House Centre on Global Health Security, claims that the number of deaths caused by alcohol is higher than other diseases that the WHO put policies in place for, including tobacco and HIV/AIDS.
In a recent paper published in the peer review journal Nature Sridhar said about 2.5 million deaths a year, almost 4 percent of all deaths worldwide, are attributed to alcohol — more than the number of deaths caused by HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis or malaria.
Although WHO has long been pointing out the damage that alcohol can do world health, Sridhar suggests that WHO should enforce regulations on a global level such as a minimum drinking age, zero-tolerance drunken driving, and bans on unlimited drink specials.
But although recent high-profile alcohol-related deaths such as singer Amy Winehouse have highlighted awareness of alcohol associated problems in the US, UK and Australia, Dr Ihsan Salloum, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine, said more needed to be done in other countries.
Dr Salloum said the strategies such as setting a legal drinking age and taxing alcoholic beverages in these Western countries have helped reduce the health burden significantly, in comparison to countries without such policies.
"If we can get countries around the world to agree on these type of strategies, we can have a significant impact on morbidity and mortality," Dr Salloum said.
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The World Health Assembly points out that there are three major problems associated with binge drinking and alcoholism.
Firstly, the physical injuries that are incurred through drink driving car accidents, physical violence and suicides. Also the 60-odd related diseases that alcohol can cause including cardiovascular diseases, cancers of the mouth and esophagus and cirrhosis of the liver, and finally the detrimental effects of parental alcohol consumption on a child health and nutrition especially in developing countries.
In 2005, the worldwide total consumption was equal to 6.13 litres of pure alcohol per person 15 years and older. Unrecorded consumption accounts for nearly 30 percent of the worldwide total adult consumption.
"The WHO is the only body with the legitimacy and authority to proactively promote health through the use of international law, WHO must move forward with efforts to make safer consumption of alcohol a public health priority," Dr Sridhar wrote.
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