David Cameron appears to have jumped on the "binge drinking epidemic" meme bandwagon, read all about it at the BBC. But what cheered me up was this tractor stat right at the end of the article. I've added a screen shot of it below in case the buggers re-write the article (UPDATE: they did, screen shot of updated article at end of post):
According to Downing Street, there were 200,000 hospital admissions in 2010-11 with alcohol as the primary factor, which was 40% than in 2002-03. The £2.7bn which alcohol abuse is estimated to cost the NHS each year equates to £90 for every taxpayer.
That's great news isn't it? It means that the number of alcohol-related admissions is down enormously, down over eighty per cent in a year or two! From The Metro, 24 August 2011:
The number of people treated in hospital every day for drink-related illnesses has risen by nearly half in just five years. In total, there were 1.1million admissions in England in 2009/10 – a rise of 879 a day, new research reveals.
If you bother clicking through to the BBC and Metro articles, you will also notice that they both use the same stock photo of "young woman sitting in street with knocked over bottle (which had presumably contained alcohol)". Yes, that's right folks, we are suffering a binge drinking epidemic, but it's quite hard tracking down actual drunk people to photograph.
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Here's the updated article, with not-shock-horror stat's missing: 
Nothing
5 hours ago
10 comments:
And, of course, the 'statistics' are bollocks.
"How is it that almost all the statistics related to alcohol can be moving in the right direction, yet the numbers of alcohol-related admissions keep going up at a dizzying rate?
It’s largely a function of methodology. Alcohol-related admissions are calculated in such a way that if you are unlucky enough, say, to be involved in a fire and admitted to hospital for the treatment of your burns, it will count as 0.38 of an alcohol-related admission – unless you happen to be under 15, when it won’t count at all.
If you drown, it counts as 0.34 of an alcohol-related admission – though most people unlucky enough to drown aren’t admitted to hospital. Getting chilled to the bone (accidental excessive cold) counts for 0.25 of an admission, intentional self-harm to 0.20 per cent of an admission." etc...
From Straight Statistics, one of many to point this out.
(interesting response from Andy Sutherland, Head of Profession for Statistics, NHS IC, about 4 coments down)
Minimum pricing is such a canard. If the government wanted to increase the retail price of booze it could simply increase the duty. It won't because it is frit of being accused of "stealth taxes".
Also, didn't we have drunk tanks until fairly recently? They were got rid of for good reason.
Cameron's critics are being proved right, over and over. :-(
I would guess young people that over indulge at the weekend don't spend enough on booze to care about the price. Infact If they did care they would not be wondering around town centres spending £3 a drink.
I think minimum pricing could have the peverse effect of encouraging supermarkets to promote the cheaper lines in bulk as it would distort the profit margin towards those lines as they would still be paying the same wholsale price.
This is another 'consensus' forming. 'consensus' these days meaning a fanatic adherence to a dogma despite knowing nothing about whether it is correct or not.
That's great news isn't it? It means that the number of alcohol-related admissions is down enormously, down over eighty per cent in a year or two!
Well spotted.
You were correct about the BBC- a sneaky stealth edit!
DS, ta for update, I can now send it off to biased bbc.
To be fair, there are two stats here. One is admissions with alcohol as the "primary factor" - that's the 200,000 in 2010-11. The other is the figure for admissions for "drink related illnesses", which is mostly high blood pressure and irregular heartbeat. Naturally, if you have high blood pressure and you drink then the drinking caused the high blood pressure, despite the fact that drinking lowers your blood pressure.
Needless to say, the £2.7 billion figure relates almost wholly to the "drink related illness" type of admission. Only around £700 million relates to admissions for alcohol harm e.g. liver disease.
And also, of course, the £2.7bn figure either ignores the revenue raised from alcohol taxation or, if net, is a bollocks made up figure because public health activists were fucked off with to deal with the whole 'net contributor' thing.
"It’s largely a function of methodology. Alcohol-related admissions are calculated in such a way that if you are unlucky enough, say, to be involved in a fire and admitted to hospital for the treatment of your burns, it will count as 0.38 of an alcohol-related admission – unless you happen to be under 15, when it won’t count at all."
I wonder if you could do this with road-traffic accidents - replace "alcohol related", by "road-traffic accident-related". It seems just as reasonable, e.g. if you drive home, have too much to drink and have an accident, you wouldn't have had that accident if you hadn't driven home in the first place, would you?
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