Economics and Public Health Policy

Based on a simulation model, OECD analyses show that several alcohol policies have the potential to reduce rates of heavy drinking, regular or episodic, and alcohol dependence, in three countries, by 5% to 10%. This would take those countries a long way towards achieving the voluntary target of reducing harmful alcohol use by 10% by 2025, a target adopted by the World Health Assembly in 2013 as part of the NCD Global Monitoring Framework. The OECD analysis found that governments’ ability to design and implement wide-ranging prevention strategies, combining the strengths of different policy approaches, is critical to success.

Authors: Martin Blachier, Henri Leleu, Markus Peck-Radosavljevic, Dominique-Charles Valla, Françoise Roudot-Thoraval

To survey the burden of liver disease in Europe and its causes 260 epidemiological studies published in the last five years were reviewed.

The incidence and prevalence of cirrhosis and primary liver cancer are key to understand the burden of liver disease. They represent the end-stage of liver pathology and thus are indicative of the associated mortality. About 0.1% of Hungarian males will die of cirrhosis every year compared with 0.001% of Greek females. WHO estimate that liver cancer is responsible for around 47,000 deaths per year in the EU.

Harmful alcohol consumption, viral hepatitis B and C and metabolic syndromes related to overweight and obesity are the leading causes of cirrhosis and primary liver cancer in Europe.

Feature in Science Magazine on David Nutt - reducing alcohol-related harm through sound politics, evidence-based policy and the potential of a synthetic substitute for alcohol.

Written by: Margaret Whitehead, Sue Povall, Belinda Loring

This guidance aims to support European policy-makers to improve the design and implementation of policies to reduce inequities in health. It brings together current evidence on how to develop comprehensive policy action plans to identify and address social determinants of health inequities. While great improvements have been made in health across the WHO European Region, there are still striking contrasts in the standards of health enjoyed by different countries within the Region and by different population groups within these countries. Reducing health inequities and improving governance for health and health equity are key strategic objectives of Health 2020 – the European policy framework for health and well-being endorsed by the 53 Member States of the WHO European Region in 2012. This guide seeks to assist European policy-makers in contributing to achieving the objectives of Health 2020 in a practical way. It draws on key evidence, including from the WHO Regional Office for Europe’s Review of social determinants and the health divide in the WHO European Region. It also provides a framework that policy-makers at national, regional and local levels can apply to their own unique context, in order to consider the processes by which inequities might occur, and to suggest policy interventions that may be helpful in addressing these factors.

Full title: Consequences and behaviour problematised: The establishment of alcohol misuse as an object of empirical inquiry in late 18th- and early 19th-century European medicine

Author: Ruuska Arto (University of Helsinki)

In his article, Arto Ruuska discusses European medical thought on alcohol in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Earlier historiography has identified the era as the starting point of individualising disease concept of alcohol addiction. Ruuska argues that the era’s proper legacy is rather the establishment of alcohol-related phenomena as objects of empirical inquiry, and – contrary to the claims made in the historiography of the ‘disease concept of addiction’ – the articulation of socio-cultural embeddedness of alcohol-related pathologies.