Cheap and illicit alcohol kills more than half of all Russian men and women in their most productive years and the government must act to reverse the trend, a study to be published in The Lancet at the weekend said.
“Excessive alcohol consumption in Russia, particularly by men, has in several recent years caused more than half of all the deaths at ages of 15-54 years,” The Lancet said.
The research conducted in three industrial cities — Tomsk, Barnaul and Biysk — said “excess mortality from liver cancer, throat cancer, liver disease and pancreatic disease is largely or wholly because alcohol caused the disease that caused death.”
High mortality from tuberculosis and pneumonia may be partly a result of increased exposure to infection, weak immunity, or decreased likelihood of cure, the research found.
Russia’s mortality rate in people aged 15 to 54 was more than five times higher for men and three times higher for women than in Western Europe, the study showed.
Alcohol is responsible for about three-quarters of the deaths of all Russian men aged 15 to 54 and about half of all deaths of Russian women of the same age, the data showed.
Russia must stop or tax the illicit alcohol output, the article said, adding that this in turn would mean “confrontation with organized criminals and corrupt officials ... All that is needed is the political will to make public health a priority.”
“Each year 1.3 million people die from cardio-vascular diseases in Russia,” said David Zaridze, head of the Russian Cancer Research Center and principal author of the study.
“Based on our investigation, it is possible to suggest that at least a third of these deaths is linked to alcohol consumption and not to any specific heart pathology,” he said.
Alcohol-related deaths also include suicides, murders, drowning and deaths in fires, he said.
A UN report in April said that poor diet, leading to heart disease, heavy drinking and the high incidence of violent deaths may cut Russia’s present population of some 142 million to around 131 million by 2025.
Store shelves across Russia are laden with cheap vodka that costs between 60 rubles (US$1.92) and 80 rubles per half liter bottle, while Russia’s illicit alcohol production is estimated to account for at least 50 percent of consumption.
Alexander Nemtsov, a department chief at the Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry, estimated Russia’s annual consumption at 15 liters of pure alcohol per capita, including children and elderly people. This compares with just 6 liters in 1864, he said.
He estimated Russia had some 2.5 million registered alcoholics and about the same number of unregistered ones.
“Drunkards, not alcoholics, are the main threat to demography,” Nemtsov said. “Heavy drinkers make up 40 percent of Russian males, but this figure may be bigger.”
The proportion of male and female drinkers is 4 to 1, he said.
Approximately 30,000 people — twice the number the Soviet Union lost during its 10-year war in Afghanistan — die from alcohol poisoning in Russia each year.
Psychiatrist Nemtsov said fighting drinking in Russia was an uphill task, because cheap vodka was only part of the problem.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS