Policy Briefing
Indonesia launches first-ever WTO case against EU
Indonesia launched its
first complaint against the EU at the WTO on Monday, reports Reuters. The country wants the EU to reverse its EU anti-dumping duties on imports of Indonesian fatty alcohols. The two sides have 60 days to resolve the dispute before it enters a full-blown WTO settlement
Australia: Alcohol plain labels needed, but lobby too powerful: campaigner
The Federal Government has finally
won its battle for plain packaging on cigarettes. Why not alcohol?
Rob Moodie is the Professor of Public Health at the Melbourne School of Population Health. He says the public needs to be pushed towards safer products, and wants tighter regulation of alcholic content as well as alcohol labelling and marketing. Professor Moodie says "passive drinking" is a huge problem that should be considered as equivalent to passive smoking. He blames lack of advertising regulation on politics, and the influence of the alcohol industry.
United States: Early alcohol use and early intoxication can herald trouble for college students
Results of
a new study will be published in the November 2012 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View. "Many studies have found relationships between an early AFD (age at first drink) and a range of negative alcohol-related outcomes later in life, including the development of alcohol use disorders, legal problems like DUI, and health problems like cirrhosis of the liver," said Meghan Rabbitt Morean, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine and corresponding author for the study. "There is also evidence that beginning to drink at an early age is associated with more immediate problems, such as compromised brain development and liver damage during adolescence, risky sexual behaviors, poor performance in school, and use of other substances like marijuana and cocaine."
"As expected, beginning to use alcohol at an earlier age was associated with heavier drinking and the experience of more negative consequences during senior year of college," said Morean. "Quickly progressing from first alcohol use to drinking to intoxication was also an important predictor of heavy drinking and the experience of alcohol related problems during senior year of college."
United Kingdom: Poor areas 'hit harder by alcohol'
Poorer communities have substantially higher levels of alcohol-related ill health, anti-social behaviour and premature deaths than their wealthier neighbours,
research has suggested.
Although data shows that there are drink-related problems across all communities, people living in England's most deprived local authorities are more likely to suffer than those living in the more affluent ones.
Children under 18 are 129% more likely to be admitted to hospital for an alcohol-specific condition, such as as alcoholic liver disease, in poorer communities compared with the most affluent ones, according to data from the North West Public Health Observatory on behalf of the Public Health Observatories in England.
