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CDC: 1 In 10 Adult Deaths In US Caused By Excessive Drinking
An anonymous reader writes: According to new research from the CDC, 9.8% of deaths in working-age adults (22-64 years old) in the U.S. from 2006 to 2010 were "attributable to excessive drinking." This makes excessive drinking the fourth leading cause of preventable death in the U.S. The study included deaths from medical conditions, such as liver disease and alcohol-induced strokes, as well as deaths from alcohol-related events, like car accidents, homicides, and fall injuries. However, it did not account for cases where excessive alcohol consumption was a factor in contracting conditions like AIDS, pneumonia, and tuberculosis, so the count may actually be higher. Many western states with low population spread out over a large area showed the highest alcohol-related death rates, while states from the east coast and the midwest tended to be on the lower end of the spectrum. The study also tracked years of life lost, which is higher for alcohol-related deaths than for most other types of death. Researcher Robert Brewer said, "One of the issues with alcohol that is particularly tragic is the extent to which it gets people in the prime of their lives."
Guess we better reinstate prohibition. Oh and it must cause health problems, so it needs banning like soda too. Oh yeah, lets not forget "for the children"
Drink to that.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
I don't care if you drink yourself to an early grave.
I don't care if you smoke yourself to an early grave.
I don't care if you eat yourself to an early grave.
This is all about more gov control, taxes, regulation to protect us from ourselves.
It works so well with currently illegal drugs.
1 in 10 deaths, huh? That's a bold statement considering the huge qualifications on it:
* 22-64 years old
* preventable
So the actual number is much less than 1 in 10, not much more as the summary says.
Having had an alcoholic step dad and grandfather I can say there's many reasons that people drink. Mostly it's one because they want to and if they don't have alcohol they'll use something else smoking, drugs whatever may be available. Alcohol allows people to self medicate and avoid things in life or help to forget things in life, like the fact that their lives didn't turn out as planned. For others it's just an activity because others are doing it around them and they can't stop because they get addicted to it.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
From the text: "And those premature deaths cost the United States $224 billion a year, the report found, or $1.90 a drink."
This does not deserve to live on Oprah, much less Slashdot. Not on Fox News, not on Rush Limbaugh, not on Howard Stern, not on Jerry Springer. On its own, exactly as it stands, it would set a new standard for outright stupidity in any legal jurisdiction that has yet to legislate pi = 3.
Oh, but wait, there's a footnote: preventable deaths among working-aged adult Americans. THAT'S NOT FUCKING FINE PRINT. My credibility circuit assigned six zeros (0.00000% chance of being true) before I managed to read the next line.
In all the many long years I've been here, I can not recall a single story headline that revolts me to this degree. I was reading recently Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics by Michael Ignatieff. At some point during his election campaign he said something stupid about the Middle East. His campaign manager pulled him aside and explained to him: "Politicians have nine lives. You just burned eight."
I have a finite amount of all-caps to expend on Slashdot outrage. I just burned 80% of my lifetime supply. Next time I resort to all-caps, I'll never post here again.
Of *course* the drug lords have lobbyists in DC, they just don't announce themselves. Move the stuff off the black market and profits fall through the floor. Even with all the attempts at restricting production the price of pot in Colorado and other (semi)-legalized states is falling.
Given the fact that prohibition doesn't actually work and never has (we can't even keep drugs out of *prisons*, how could we possibly keep them out of a free society?), there are only two rational reasons to attempt it:
(1) Police empowerment - nothing like a mandate to fight an unwinnable war on an ill-defined subset of the general population to provide an excuse for ever-increasing funding and the erosion of civil rights.
(2) Bolstering the black market. And as a bonus since they're operating outside the law in an extremely lucrative market, the merchants have incentive to resort to violence among themselves and with the authorities, further bolstering (1).
Take your pick. Historically both outcomes are the only major results of any prohibition attempt in a free society.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The high mortality rate due to drinking amongst slashdotters can be directly attributed to physical and emotional abuse. Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP have ushered millions of nerds into an early grave from alcohol poisoning alone. the longterm effects of say, A peoplesoft migration however are much more destructive as theyre often worsened by the invisible culprit of change management. Taking a look at the youth of today, gateways like SCRUM and devops mean that not only are our future hackers drinking more at an early age, theyre forced to undergo gruelling "stand up" meetings that require then to concentrate all their effort into their creamy, underdeveloped legs to keep them aloft. the agony of being away from their natural habitat, the herman miller chair, coupled with the verbal and emotional abuse from phrases like swim-lanes and synergy amount to nothing short of an epidemic in IT.
but you can take action to stop this. IT workers thrive in an environment of nerf, far away from their natural predator the project manager. warmed slices of pizza pie and refreshing caffeinated nectars are what can keep this endangered species of young codelings healthy and free from substance abuse. The presence of the rare git-push neckbeard, or in some collectives a majestic greyhair vax longbeard have confirmed that excessive drinking is in fact no longer a problem in many dimly lit, cool climate colonies.
Good people go to bed earlier.
But how many births are caused by excessive drinking?
It is all about the details and perspective really. It is usually really hard for people to understand what is going on behind the numbers as opposed to simply taking the values at face value. There is always the cause VS causality issue as well.
Didn't read the actual article (bc frankly I don't care that much), but I did read the abstract. My thoughts are this: So those deaths that were found to be attributable to alcohol, most of them are not "direct" but rather "attributed". So technically the alcohol didn't kill, the abrupt stopping of the car into a tree did (or the blunt trauma caused by said tree really). Not only that, but many of these "causes" are more like "contributed to" rather than attributed to. That is more like a percentage, not a whole. Not to mention how far down the cause train do you want to go... what caused the drinking, depression? What caused the depression, impotence? So on and etc... Now on all those things, car crash, liver problems, etc... that single death is counted exactly how many times? Then you take those extrapolated values and compare them to population data? Laughable. If however your went through your numbers and made decisions based on some threshold or determined tolerance, to count the one death to exactly one and only one issue, then removed those values from all other counts, and then compared it to population data, it would be somewhat meaningful. Otherwise all you are saying is booze is associated with a bunch of stuff that can kill you, which pretty much everyone knows already.
I recently had a similar issue doing analysis for a client. Where statistically values fell into more than one camp. If you add them all up, you are going to get a number much larger than your actual population. In that instance, I suggested evaluating each individual point by a set agreed upon criteria, which would put it into one particular bucket and not multiple buckets. In this manner you can produce meaningful statistics and can include in your analysis the cravat of exactly how you arrived at your values, which is verifiable, repeatable, and defensible. However doing that is a lot of work and computation, though I saw a lot of letters after the names of people doing that research, so perhaps I should assume they also looked at this.... somehow I doubt it however.
... to raise a glass in honor of the departed?