LONDON (REUTERS) - Up to 210,000 people in England and Wales will be killed prematurely by alcohol over the next 20 years, with a third of those preventable deaths due to liver disease alone, health experts warned on Monday.
Other alcohol-related deaths will be due to accidents, violence and suicide, or from chronic diseases such as high blood pressure, strokes, heart disease and cancer, the experts warned in a projection study in the Lancet medical journal.
Yet Ian Gilmore, former president of the Royal College of Physicians and one of the lead authors of the work, said it was'entirely within the power of the UK government' to take steps to tackle Britain's drink problem and 'prevent the worst-case scenario of avoidable deaths'.
The experts pointed to measures taken in the former Soviet Union in the 1980s, which they said saw alcohol consumption fall by a third in two years with a resulting 12 per cent drop in the rate of alcohol-related deaths.
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