Jump to full article: AP, 2009-06-25
Author: DOUGLAS BIRCH
Intro: A new study by an international team of public health researchers documents the devastating impact of alcohol abuse on Russia — showing that drinking caused more than half of deaths among Russians aged 15 to 54 in the turbulent era following the Soviet collapse.
The 52 percent figure compares to estimates that less than 4 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by alcohol abuse, according to the study by Russian, British and French researchers published in Friday's edition of the British medical journal The Lancet.
The Russian findings were based on a survey of almost 49,000 deaths between 1990 and 2001 among young adult and middle-aged Russians in three industrial towns in western Siberia, which had typical 1990s Russian mortality patterns.
Professor David Zaridze, head of the Russian Cancer Research Center and lead author of the study, estimated that the increase in alcohol consumption since 1987, the year when then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's restrictions on alcohol sales collapsed, cost the lives of 3 million Russians who would otherwise be alive today. "This loss is similar to that of a war," Zaridze said. . . .
Some researchers have blamed the crumbling of the Soviet health care system, increased smoking, changes in diet or a loss of jobs that raised stress levels for the mysterious rise in deaths.
Many others, like Zaridze and his team, pin the blame squarely on increased drinking, which the report says roughly doubled in Russia between 1987 and 1994 . . .
"If you look at the dynamics of death and the dynamics of alcohol consumption in Russia, it is obvious that all these sharp increases and decreases of the mortality level are caused by increases and decreases in alcohol consumption," Zaridze said.
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