The products and practices of the alcohol industry are among the biggest threats to health and development worldwide.
Regarding health harms for example, alcohol causes seven types of cancer. Since 2006, the total number of healthy life years lost due to alcohol-related cancer in the world has increased by 11%.
Another example goes beyond health harm to the alcohol consumer: the social or second-hand harms due to alcohol.
The total harm caused by alcohol is nearly double that of tobacco when the direct (health) and indirect (social) harms are combined. And alcohol’s second-hand harm has been found to be three times greater than the second-hand harm caused by tobacco.
While tobacco primarily harms non-smokers through second-hand smoke exposure, alcohol’s collateral damage encompasses a broader range of social harms, affecting individuals and communities in more diverse and often violent ways.
Alcohol not only leads to direct health problems, such as liver disease and various cancers, but also contributes significantly to second-hand harms. These cause damage to individuals who have not consumed alcohol themselves, such as victims of alcohol impaired driving, domestic violence, family disruptions, workplace productivity losses,
Alcohol consumption and disease, disability, and death worldwide
- In 2019, 56% of the world’s population aged 15+ abstained from alcohol consumption.
- But the amount of alcohol consumption per capita among alcohol consumers amounts on average to 27 grams of pure alcohol per day – an amount that causes increased risks of morbidity, mortality and disability, according to the WHO Global Alcohol Status Report in 2024.
- In 2019 the prevalence of alcohol consumption among 15–19-year-olds was unacceptably high worldwide at 22%, with very little gender differences and a tendency of increase from initially low levels in some regions.
- At least 400 million people aged 15 years and older had an Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) in 2019. This means that at least 7% of the global adult population have an AUD and 209 million of them even lived with an alcohol dependence (3.7% of all people aged 15+ years).
- Among the 230 three-digit ICD-10 codes that are alcohol-related, digestive tract or gastrointestinal diseases, unintentional injuries, cardiovascular diseases and cancers are the leading contributors to the 2.6 million alcohol deaths in 2019, responsible for 22.0%, 19.8%, 18.0% and 15.3% of these deaths, respectively.
- Unintentional injuries, digestive diseases, AUDs, and communicable diseases were the leading contributors to the burden of disease and injury caused by alcohol, responsible for 28.5%, 16.7%, 16.6% and 10.2% of all alcohol-attributable DALYs, respectively.
The current trends indicate that the global target set for alcohol consumption will not be met by 2030.
