The World Health Organization's Global Alcohol Database: Opportunities for Research and Support for Policy

Autor: Louis Gliksman, Margaret Rylett
Rok vydání: 2009
Předmět:
Zdroj: Contemporary Drug Problems. 36:589-605
ISSN: 2163-1808
0091-4509
Popis: In 1980, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Addiction Research Foundation (Canada), with the help of contributors from more than 80 countries in the six WHO regions, published a review of alcohol-related prevention measures, policies and programs (Moser, 1980). This, and other WHO actions, led to a World Health Assembly resolution in 1983 (EB71/1983/REC/L5) calling on Member States to formulate explicit and comprehensive national alcohol policies with prevention as a priority, and to develop mechanisms to coordinate programs and activities for reducing alcohol consumption and alcohol-related problems on a planned, continuous and long-term basis. Notwithstanding this resolution, it has been difficult for the WHO to maintain and sustain attention to alcohol. Between 1983 and 1990 the focus on alcohol was mainly on "alcohol and causalities, an alcohol education trial, and the initiation of a project on biological markers of alcohol use and dependence" (Room, 2005, p. 149). In 1990, "an ambitious Strategy Document [was set out] that outlined a number of areas for programmatic action" (Room, 2005, p. 149). As a result, in 1996, the WHO Substance Abuse Department began two initiatives: (1) a project aimed at "examining and summarizing the scientific base for and experience with alcohol policies in developing society contexts" (Riley & Marshall, 1999; Babor et al., 2003), and (2) the development of a database to bring together information on the alcohol and health situation in individual countries.There is clearly a need for this kind of comprehensive data. Alcohol policy is being made or not made by default, generally without the benefit of science. As science mounts to support certain policies and to refute other policies, the former need to be promoted. While recorded alcohol consumption among adults has fallen steadily in most developed countries since 1980, it has risen steadily in the developing countries and in countries of the former Soviet Union. The rise in alcohol consumption in developing countries provides ample cause for concern over the possible matching rise in alcohol-related problems in those regions of the world most at risk (World Health Organization, 1999). According to Rehm and Eschmann (2002), "alcohol is the leading risk factor for disease burden in low mortality developing countries and the third largest risk factor in developed countries (pp. 48-58)." The Global Burden of Disease study, sponsored by the WHO and the World Bank, puts alcohol's global health impact on a par with unsafe sex in terms of its contribution to the total number of years of life lost to death and disability as recorded in Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) (Ezzati, Lopez, Rodgers & Murray, 2004). In addition to chronic diseases that may affect drinkers after many years of heavy use, alcohol contributes to acute outcomes that kill or disable at a relatively young age, resulting in the loss of many years of life to death or disability. However, until the Global Burden of Disease was published in 2004, there had been no systematic global analysis of the epidemiology of alcohol use and related harm (Ezzati et al., 2004). The resolution on alcohol adopted in May, 2005 by the World Health Assembly (WHA 58-26) generated renewed interest and activity in this area.Given alcohol's significance to world health, WHO recognized the need to provide policy makers and health professionals with adequate epidemiological information. An important task for WHO is to stimulate and develop data on the epidemiology of alcohol use and to fill major gaps in knowledge, particularly with respect to developing countries. WHO therefore tries to distill information on the best evidence on alcohol consumption and related harm and provides technical assistance to Member States in collecting their own data and monitoring trends. Several projects and documents support these purposes: the Global Information System on Alcohol and Health; the Global Status Report on Alcohol; the Global Status Report on Alcohol Policy; and the International Guide for Monitoring Alcohol Consumption and Related Harm. …
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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