Rampant use of illicit alcohol adding to global disease burden, says report

Washington, November 20 : A staggering amount of illicit alcohol is being produced, sold, and consumed across the globe and this, in turn, is significantly adding to the worldwide disease burden, reveals a new report.

As per a new report issued by the International Center for Alcohol Policies (ICAP), non-commercial alcohol was often produced from medicinal compounds, automobile products, and cosmetics and could cause extreme harm to public health, particularly in developing and transition countries.

The study titled 'Noncommercial Alcohol in Three Regions' found an extensive use of illicit alcohol absent from official statistics and concentrated on sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Asia, and central and Eastern Europe as its chief regions.

The researchers observed that many African countries such as Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, and Zimbabwe had their unrecorded alcohol consumption surpassing the official recorded alcohol consumption.

While Ukraine saw illicit alcohol exceeding the recorded alcohol consumption, (10.5 vs. 6.09 per capita consumption in litres, respectively), Sri Lanka's non-commercial alcohol too held a 77 percent share of the market as against the 22 percent legal consumption.

Marcus Grant, President of ICAP said: "The extensive use of non-commercial alcohol around the world has detrimental and far-reaching effects on consumers, government and the industry.

"In many countries, this largely illicit alcohol has harmful effects on society because of the lack of meaningful controls."

The complete report can be found at ICAP's web site:

http://icap.org/Publication/ICAPReviews/tabid/158/Default.aspx

ANI