Ireland passes law putting cancer warnings on alcohol

Alcoholic drinks in Ireland will be labelled with cancer warnings under a groundbreaking law passed Wednesday, which also sets a minimum price in a bid to tackle a “corrosive” drinking culture.

AFP Relaxnews

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October 12, 2018 12:56 AM

Ireland ranks joint third for binge-drinking out of 194 countries, according to research by the World Health Organisation (AFP pic)

Ministers say the bill, the first in Ireland to address alcohol as a public health issue, will help save lives.

Three years after being introduced, and against strong opposition from the drinks industry, the legislation was passed by the Seanad Eireann, the upper house of parliament.

It was adopted by the lower house Dail Eireann last week, and now only requires the approval of the president, a largely symbolic move.

Health minister Simon Harris said it was a “very special day”.

“Alcohol damages our health, it harms our communities, it hurts many families and the measures in this bill are designed to change that relationship,” he said.

“It’s about putting in place a number of measures for the first time ever in a public health perspective to try and change that corrosive culture that we currently we have with alcohol in Ireland.”

Three people a day die due to alcohol consumption in Ireland, according to 2016 report by the Health Research Board, a government agency.

The bill creates a minimum unit price for alcohol and restricts advertising of drinks, including banning ads in public parks, bus stops and train stations.

It also requires warnings of the link between cancer and alcohol to be placed on product labels, as well as the number of calories.

Patricia Callan, director of the Alcohol Beverage Federation of Ireland, said the bill would create “too big a barrier” for some companies to sell their products in Ireland.

She also criticised the health warnings, telling AFP: “The scientific evidence certainly doesn’t warrant the direct link of alcohol and cancer.”

Ministers say Ireland is the fourth heaviest-drinking nation in the OECD in terms of quantity of alcohol consumed, and ranks joint third for binge-drinking out of 194 countries in research by the World Health Organisation.

Scotland introduced a minimum price for alcohol earlier this year, while countries including Russia and Ukraine, and some Canadian states, have taken similar measures.

https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/leisure/2018/10/12/ireland-passes-law-putting-cancer-warnings-on-alcohol/

Deadly link between alcohol and breast cancer is 'ignored by middle-aged women who are MOST at risk of developing the disease'

• Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed form of the disease in Australia
• Women in their 40s, 50s and 60s still consume large amounts of alcohol 
• They accept alcohol can cause weight gain and relationship breakdowns

By PETER LLOYD FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 19:00 GMT, 13 February 2019 | UPDATED: 19:00 GMT, 13 February 2019

Middle-aged women are not getting the message about the proven link between alcohol and breast cancer, new research suggests.

Females in their 40s, 50s and 60s are still consuming large mounts of wine, beer and spirits despite rates of the disease rising in their age brackets.

Data from Flinders University in Adelaide shows a disconnect between the cause and effect, despite public awareness campaigns. 

But they accept alcohol can result in weight gain and lead to relationship breakdowns. 

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Did you know? Women in their 40s, 50s and 60s are still consuming large mounts of wine, beer and spirits despite rates of breast cancer increasing in their age brackets (stock)

Study lead author Dr Emma Miller said: There is a low level of awareness about the established link between alcohol and breast cancer, and some confusion about the risk given the community perception that not all drinkers get breast cancer.

'So it's really important to understand the patterns and drivers behind drinking behaviour in order to develop policies and interventions that might reduce the increasing burden on the women and our health system.'

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in Australia, accounting for more than 13 per cent of all new forms of the disease and 28 per cent of all malignant tumours diagnosed in women.

As part of the study, 35 South Australian women - aged between 45 and 64 - who have never been diagnosed with cancer, were interviewed about their alcohol consumption, education level and perceived risk of breast cancer.  

Dr Miller claims the findings suggest targeted messages that address short-term risks will have the greatest impact. 

'Alcohol is firmly entrenched in the fabric of Australian society, providing pleasure and defining the major events in most of our lives,' she said.

'Raising awareness of alcohol-related cancer risk, despite the importance of this, will not be sufficient to counter patterns of consumption.'  

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Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in Australia, accounting for more than 13 per cent of all new forms of the disease and 28 per cent of all cancers in women (stock)

Dr Miller added: 'We all want to hear good news about drinking, such as small amounts of red wine may be good for cardiovascular disease, which is a message that's promoted by the alcohol industry.

'In contrast, information that alcohol is linked to breast cancer is actively suppressed by the industry presumably in order to build the female customer base.

'Our research shows that while more middle aged women are drinking, there are ways of getting the right messages through by focusing on issues important to them.

'For example, younger people are drinking less so we can look into the reasons behind that and utilise them.'

WHAT IS BREAST CANCER, HOW MANY PEOPLE DOES IT STRIKE AND WHAT ARE THE SYMPTOMS?

Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers in the world. Each year in the UK there are more than 55,000 new cases, and the disease claims the lives of 11,500 women. In the US, it strikes 266,000 each year and kills 40,000. But what causes it and how can it be treated?

What is breast cancer?

Breast cancer develops from a cancerous cell which develops in the lining of a duct or lobule in one of the breasts.

When the breast cancer has spread into surrounding breast tissue it is called an 'invasive' breast cancer. Some people are diagnosed with 'carcinoma in situ', where no cancer cells have grown beyond the duct or lobule.

Most cases develop in women over the age of 50 but younger women are sometimes affected. Breast cancer can develop in men though this is rare.

The cancerous cells are graded from stage one, which means a slow growth, up to stage four, which is the most aggressive.

What causes breast cancer?

A cancerous tumour starts from one abnormal cell. The exact reason why a cell becomes cancerous is unclear. It is thought that something damages or alters certain genes in the cell. This makes the cell abnormal and multiply 'out of control'.

Although breast cancer can develop for no apparent reason, there are some risk factors that can increase the chance of developing breast cancer, such as genetics.

What are the symptoms of breast cancer?

The usual first symptom is a painless lump in the breast, although most breast lumps are not cancerous and are fluid filled cysts, which are benign. 

The first place that breast cancer usually spreads to is the lymph nodes in the armpit. If this occurs you will develop a swelling or lump in an armpit.

How is breast cancer diagnosed?

• Initial assessment: A doctor examines the breasts and armpits. They may do tests such as a mammography, a special x-ray of the breast tissue which can indicate the possibility of tumours.
• Biopsy: A biopsy is when a small sample of tissue is removed from a part of the body. The sample is then examined under the microscope to look for abnormal cells. The sample can confirm or rule out cancer.

If you are confirmed to have breast cancer, further tests may be needed to assess if it has spread. For example, blood tests, an ultrasound scan of the liver or a chest x-ray.

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How is breast cancer treated?

Treatment options which may be considered include surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and hormone treatment. Often a combination of two or more of these treatments are used.

• Surgery: Breast-conserving surgery or the removal of the affected breast depending on the size of the tumour.
• Radiotherapy: A treatment which uses high energy beams of radiation focussed on cancerous tissue. This kills cancer cells, or stops cancer cells from multiplying. It is mainly used in addition to surgery.
• Chemotherapy: A treatment of cancer by using anti-cancer drugs which kill cancer cells, or stop them from multiplying
• Hormone treatments: Some types of breast cancer are affected by the 'female' hormone oestrogen, which can stimulate the cancer cells to divide and multiply. Treatments which reduce the level of these hormones, or prevent them from working, are commonly used in people with breast cancer.

How successful is treatment?

The outlook is best in those who are diagnosed when the cancer is still small, and has not spread. Surgical removal of a tumour in an early stage may then give a good chance of cure.

The routine mammography offered to women between the ages of 50 and 70 mean more breast cancers are being diagnosed and treated at an early stage.

For more information visit breastcancercare.org.uk or www.cancerhelp.org.uk

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-6701145/Deadly-link-alcohol-breast-cancer-ignored-middle-aged-women.html

Any Amount of Drinking Is Bad for You. Here's What Experts Say

A new study concludes there’s no amount of alcohol consumption that’s safe for overall health — a finding that’s likely to surprise moderate drinkers, and that has left some experts unconvinced.

By JAMIE DUCHARME 

August 24, 2018

HEALTHWISE

For years, public health officials have said that, while no one should pick up drinking in search of better health, moderate drinking (defined as up to a drink per day for women and up to two per day for men) probably won’t hurt anyone who already imbibes, and may even confer some benefits. This standard is written into the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and is supported by organizations including the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society.

But the new paper, published Thursday in The Lancet, calls that long-held conclusion into question.

“The evidence is adding up that no amount of drinking is safe,” says study co-author Emmanuela Gakidou, a professor of global health and health metrics sciences at the University of Washington. “I don’t think we’re going out on a limb to say anything that the data do not support.”

The new research was based on a review of nearly 700 existing studies on global drinking prevalence and nearly 600 studies on alcohol and health, and found that alcohol was the seventh leading risk factor for premature death in 2016, contributing to 2.8 million deaths worldwide. That number is equivalent to 2.2% of all female deaths and 6.8% of all male deaths that year, according to the study.

The health risks likely only increase the more you drink, the study found. Compared to non-drinkers, people who had one alcoholic beverage per day had a 0.5% higher risk of developing one of 23 alcohol-related health problems, including cancer, road injuries and tuberculosis, in a given year, the study says. At that level, the absolute increase is small, equaling only four additional deaths per 100,000 people per year, according to the study. But those who had two drinks per day had a risk 7% higher than non-drinkers. At five drinks per day, the risk was 37% higher, the study says.

Gakidou’s paper did show some modest cardiovascular benefits associated with moderate drinking, particularly among women, but she says that effect is overshadowed by the numerous ways alcohol can threaten health. When you consider risks like breast cancer and road traffic injuries, she says, “the protective effect goes away, even at low doses.”

Other experts have recently come to similar conclusions. In May, for example, the World Cancer Research Fund released a report saying that, at least in terms of cancer prevention, “it’s best not to drink alcohol.” The U.K. government made a similar recommendation in 2016.

Meanwhile, some studies have questioned the long-standing idea that moderate drinking is good for heart health. That’s in part because some older studies didn’t account for the fact that many people who don’t drink abstain either because they had addiction issues in the past, or have other health problems that force them to stay away from alcohol. Including these individuals in the general non-drinking population may have skewed research results to make teetotalers as a whole group look unhealthier than they actually are, some studies have suggested.

Walter Willett, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, questions the conclusion that the cons of drinking always outweigh the pros. While there’s “no question” that heavy drinking is harmful, he says that plenty of data supports links between moderate drinking and lower total mortality and a decreased risk of heart disease — which, he says, are far more relevant concerns for most Americans than something like tuberculosis, which the Lancet paper identifies as a leading alcohol-related disease worldwide. Tuberculosis is very rare in the U.S.

“Our decisions about drinking in the United States shouldn’t be influenced by what alcohol does to tuberculosis,” Willett says. “When you throw together everything in one big pot and draw conclusions for the whole world, it’s just misleading.”

Willett does acknowledge that even moderate drinking comes with tradeoffs. A drink a day may decrease a woman’s risk of heart disease but increase her risk of breast cancer. For a young, healthy woman who is unlikely to die of heart disease, those risks might outweigh the benefits. But that’s a decision that woman would have to make with her doctor, Willett says — and it’s unlikely the entire population would or should come to the same conclusion.

“I think they went too far in this paper,” Willett says. “There are risks and benefits, and I think it’s important to have the best information about all of those and come to some personal decisions, and engage one’s health care provider in that process as well.”

Gakidou, on the other hand, says her paper’s recommendation is valid precisely because individual health decisions are so variable.

“We don’t have the information for specific individuals…we’re making overall recommendations at the population level,” she says. “If you’re running a health system in a country, it’s better overall for the population of your country to not drink at all than to drink a little bit.”

Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, agrees with that assessment. It’s clear, he says, that drinking comes with health risks, and far less clear that it comes with any benefits. So while some moderate drinkers might never experience health problems from drinking, “if you look at all the risks and all the benefits of alcohol, it’s probably net harmful, on average, for the whole population,” he says.

While that conclusion may seem stark to people who have come to feel virtuous about their nightly glass of wine, Mozaffarian says it’s actually not so different from current medical advice.

“I think this is actually consistent with every organization’s recommendation that, overall, no one should start drinking to prevent heart disease or diabetes,” Mozaffarian says. “No organization has ever recommended to drink alcohol. The recommendation has been that if you drink — and that’s the key caveat — don’t drink more than moderately.”

http://time.com/5376552/how-much-alcohol-to-drink-study/

Why does alcohol make us drunk? You asked Google – here’s the answer

Every day millions of people ask Google life’s most difficult questions. Our writers answer some of the commonest queries

Pete Brown

Wed 16 May 2018 08.00 BST

Pete Brown

Wed 16 May 2018 08.00 BSTLast modified on Wed 16 May 2018 08.16 BST

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 ‘Humans’ ambiguous relationship with alcohol is older than civilisation.’ Photograph: Johnny Green/PA

Ah, alcohol. As Homer once said, this infamous molecule is both “the cause of, and the solution to, all of life’s problems”.

OK, it was Homer Simpson who said that rather than the classical bard, but it’s no less true or profound for that. Sometimes, the rubbish you come out with when you’re drunk really is quite clever, or funny, or both, so long as you can remember it properly the next morning.

Our ambiguous relationship with alcohol is older than civilisation – in fact there’s a strong argument that it was the cause of civilisation itself. We’ve been drinking it since our dawn as a species, and it probably helped us evolve into humans in the first place. It may even have played a role in the very creation of life on earth. No, I’m not drunk. This is proper science.

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For all that time, alcohol has been, as Simpson said so beautifully, both a cause of great pleasure and, for a minority, colossal pain. Our relationship as a society with alcohol swings on a pendulum over time between celebrating the positives and deploring the negatives, and right now we’re over on the temperance side. Between 1785 and 1985, The Times used the term “binge drinking” a total of 49 times. The same paper ran over 300 stories about binge drinking in 2004 alone. Which is odd, because people were drinking much less in 2004 than their ancestors had been at pretty much any point in the preceding two centuries.

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 ‘Ethanol behaves quite differently with the depressive Gaba, convincing it to switch to shots, grab a kebab and then go on to a club and do Jägerbombs.’ Photograph: Mark Dunn/Alamy Stock Photo

This means we live in an age of alarmist misinformation about the perils of booze, with a growing belief that any level of consumption of this “poison” is potentially harmful. If there were any truth to this claim, given the quantities we used to drink in the past, the human race would have been extinct long ago.

Adverisement

So what does alcohol really do to us? And how does it do it? The truth is, neuroscientists are still in the process of figuring this out. To a significant degree, it depends on who you are, what your relationship with alcohol is, what and how you’re drinking, and also, ultimately, what you mean by “drunk”.

Let’s look at the physiological effects first. The active component in booze is ethanol, which as molecules go, has all the sly charm of one of those beery lads who can worm his way past the velvet ropes of any bar in the world. Water soluble and small enough to pass through and between cell walls, ethanol is drawn first to the liver, which immediately begins to break it down. But the liver only works so fast, so surplus ethanol shoots on through to every part of the body and ends up in the brain within minutes. It does all sorts of stuff to our digestive system, our motor functions, our need to pee and much more, but it’s the feeling of drunkenness that fascinates us.

How I let drinking take over my life

 

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Information and instructions are carried around the brain by neurons – excitable cells that carry data. Neurons don’t touch, but communicate across tiny gaps known as synapses, using chemicals known as neurotransmitters. Simplistically, these fall into two types: “excitatory impulses”, which tell us to do stuff and are carried by glutamate, and “inhibitory signals” which tell us to do less, and travel via gamma-aminobutyric acid, or Gaba. Trillions of these signals are happening all the time, and their net effect is the mind itself, and our sense (some would say illusion) of consciousness.

Ethanol gleefully speeds into the synapses, cascading into the gaps between the neurons, and then sidles up to them, puts its arms around their shoulders and assures them it’s their best mate in the whole world. You might be suspicious if a stranger did this to you in a pub unless you were already gattered, but your neurons totally believe the ethanol molecules, and scientists still don’t really know why.

When it binds to glutamate, ethanol slows it down and stops it from acting, like the pub bore who pins you in the corner and gives you an episode-by-episode recap of Game of Thrones even though you keep saying yes, you’ve seen it, and you really have to go because you just remembered you left the babysitter in the oven. But it behaves quite differently with the depressive Gaba, basically convincing it to switch to shots, grab a kebab and then go on to a club and do Jägerbombs.

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 ‘Loss of motor function, memory loss, nausea and so on often only kick in at high blood alcohol concentrations.’ Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

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This double-bind effect – dulling the active signals and amplifying the sedative ones – is what we really mean when we say alcohol is a depressant: it doesn’t make you depressed – at least not at low levels – but it slows down and depresses your active functions, making the brain slower and more sedate and, given enough time and reinforcements, can accelerate the process until you pass out, or in very extreme cases, forget to breathe. But at the same time, ethanol also jacks up the release of dopamine, exciting the part of the brain that perceives reward. Your brain tells you this reward is related to the ethanol you consumed, so you consume more, depressing your brain function while increasing your sense of euphoria.

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Loss of motor function, memory loss, nausea and so on often only kick in at high blood alcohol concentrations. The vast majority of drinking is more moderate, and here, perceptions of tipsiness are not as straightforward as simple brain chemistry. From the 1970s onwards, psychologist Alan Marlatt developed a series of experiments where the taste of a placebo was indistinguishable from that of an alcoholic drink. He gave the placebo to half the subjects and alcohol to the other half. But then he cut the group in half the other way too, telling half they were drinking alcohol and half they were not. So, you had people expecting alcohol and getting it, people expecting alcohol and not getting it, and vice versa with those not expecting alcohol.

Consistently, those who believed they were drinking alcohol – whether they actually were or not – showed signs of intoxication including flushed faces, more animated behaviour and slurring of speech. Those who thought they were not drinking alcohol – even alcoholics, in some of the experiments – did not. Marlatt also showed that the perceived effects of intoxication were far more pronounced in social situations than when subjects were drinking alone.

Why does alcohol make us drunk? When you look at the history of our relationship with it in light of Marlatt’s research, the smart-ass, know-it-all-on-the-bar-stool answer has to be: “Because we want it to.”

• Pete Brown is the author of several books on beer and pubs. He blogs about drinks at petebrown.blogspot.com

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/16/why-does-alcohol-make-us-drunk-google