Drinkers should be given separate daily and weekly alcohol limits to prevent them consuming their entire recommended allowance at the weekend, a leading doctor has said.Prof Nick Heather, of Alcohol Research UK, said current guidelines which stipulate people’s average drinking habits fail to tackle the problem of binge drinking.

He told MPs there should be two types of limit, one which dictates how much people can safely drink “on average” and one which should “stipulate an amount that should never be exceeded”.

The Department of Health previously stated that men and women should not exceed 21 and 18 units of alcohol per week respectively.

It now advises men should not “regularly” exceed three to four units of alcohol per day, with women not drinking on average more than two or three units, but people still mistakenly believe they can store up their alcohol allowance by abstaining during the week and consume excessive amounts on Friday and Saturday nights.

Prof Heather told MPs that there is a key distinction between chronic illness caused by regular heavy drinking and the injuries resulting from drunkenness after binge drinking.

As well as advising how much alcohol people can safely drink on a regular basis health authorities ought to specify that no more than eight units should be consumed in a single day, equivalent to about three 175ml glasses of wine or four pints of lager, he suggested.

He said: “The form that guidelines should take should be this, for example. Men should not drink more than X units per week, probably 21, and never more than Y units in a day, which might be eight, and as well there should be at least two days of abstinence.

“We should revert to the old weekly limits for the average guideline and have another daily limit which would never be exceeded on any day.”

Senior medical experts urged the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee, which is examining the evidence on alcohol guidelines, not to raise the current recommended drinking limits.

Prof Sir Ian Gilmore, Royal College of Physicians special adviser on alcohol and chairman of Alcohol Health Alliance UK, said the “tide of harm” in Britain’s hospitals made it imperitave alcohol levels do not rise.

He said: “As someone who still looks after people with liver disease, and with hospital admissions rising, I think that any recommendation to increase limits would add to the tide of harm that we are seeing in our hospitals every day.  Given the burden of harm that we’ve got, it’s vital that levels are not increased at this point.”

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/doctors-call-for-separate-daily-and-weekly-drinking-limits

The number of heroin and crack cocaine users needing treatment in England has fallen by 10,000 in two years. The National Treatment Agency for Substance Abuse said the number of adults that began treatment for the class A drugs fell from 62,963 in 2008/09 to 52,933 in 2010/11.

The steepest decline was in the under 30 age group.

The number of people accessing treatment for all drugs also fell for the second year running.

The latest figures also show an increase in the number of drug users “recovering” from addiction – people who no longer need treatment.

Some 27,969 users were classed as recovering in 2010/11, a rise of 18% on the previous year and 150% higher than 11,208 in 2005/06.

The figures showed that, of the 255,556 people who entered a drugs treatment programme since April 2005 for the first time, 28% (71,887) had successfully completed the course and did not need further treatment.

Paul Hayes, the NTA’s chief executive, said the figures showed that “recovery is now becoming a reality for more individuals each year.  More drug users are recovering from addiction, fewer need treatment, and more are getting over their addiction quickly.”

Mr Hayes went on to say he thought the figures showed England had “probably passed the high watermark of the impact of epidemic of the late ’80s and early ’90s and that younger groups of people were reluctant to begin patterns of behaviour… that they’ve seen cause damage to their older siblings, people in their community, sometimes, sadly their mums and dads.”

“They realise the consequences of heroin and crack use and they’re turning their backs on that,” he said.

He said officials were also seeing “significant declines in purity” which “suggests that attempts to restrict supply are having an impact”.

“It’s extremely likely, from where we sit, that the different aspects of the government’s drugs strategy are coming together to have a positive effect,” he added.

But he warned that addiction remained a “serious problem” for many communities, particularly the poorest ones.

“We need to remain vigilant, particularly in a tough economic climate. There’s absolutely no inevitability that rising unemployment among young people will see a rise to ’80s levels of heroin use, but we need to watch that situation very carefully,” he said.

The research can be found at: http://www.nta.nhs.uk/news-2011-annual-report.aspx

The advice on alcohol limits is too confusing according to Debbie Bannigan the head of the charity Swanswell. She says that ‘units’ mean nothing to many people – and the guidance should be clearer and easier to remember.

In this week’s Scrubbing Up, she says that to have a daily “safe” amount is misleading and that some people – including pregnant women and drivers – should be told “no alcohol is best”.

Most people think they have a rough idea of “how much is too much?”, but ask them for specifics and they’re not sure. Who can blame them, when the measure that is used to define safe limits – ‘units’ – is so hard to understand?

While 82% of adults claim to know what a unit of alcohol is, 77% don’t know how many units are in a typical large glass of wine.

Ironically, ‘units’ become even harder to compute when we’ve had a drink, because the part of our brain that works that sort of thing out switches off.

And the concept of a daily safe amount may even encourage the idea that we should drink alcohol every day.

To add to the confusion, we’re bombarded with new “scientific” findings about alcohol.

In the last couple of months alone, we’ve been told that alcohol damages the DNA of unborn children beyond repair, but that it’s OK for pregnant women to have a couple of glasses of wine a week, which is pretty conflicting advice.

Reported health benefits from alcohol are rarely balanced with information about the risks, or the observation that the benefits can be achieved in other ways that don’t carry any significant risks at all.

It’s little surprise that people are confused about the impact alcohol can have on their lives.

But walk into any supermarket and you’ll be encouraged to buy alcohol.

My local supermarket’s “seasonal aisle” – one of the first things you see when you enter the store – has become a wine festival.

And the end of each aisle – the “impulse buy” space – is also stacked with cans of lager and cider, so selecting and purchasing alcohol is just part of the weekly shop rather than something that we have to think about doing.

The people who come to us for help are just like you and me, but they’ve found that their choice to drink alcohol has been riskier than they expected.

What can be done about it? Official guidelines could be clearer. Other public health messages are short and snappy, like ‘clunk-click every trip’ or ‘catch it bin it kill it’. We shouldn’t be afraid of setting clear guidelines and sticking to them”

They are designed to be simple and memorable, so we learn and apply them without trying.

Units don’t work this way, but a simple phrase like ‘one or two, once or twice’ gives us a simple yardstick that drinking one or two alcoholic drinks, once or twice a week, is a good limit.

Sometimes a clear, easy to understand and safe message is that no alcohol is best – for example, for children, in pregnancy or when driving.

Scientific evidence shows that even one drink can impair judgement when driving and that alcohol affects children disproportionately, especially before they are born.

A zero limit for drivers, pregnant women and children avoids confusion and helps us all to take responsibility.  We shouldn’t be afraid of setting clear guidelines and sticking to them.

With co-operation between drinks manufacturers, supermarkets and the government we can judge the risk of alcohol use for ourselves.

Not only can we reach the point where hospital admissions are going down instead of up, we can create a society that is free from problem alcohol use altogether.

Middle aged women who indulge in an alcoholic drink or two a day are boosting their chance of good health in their seventies, a new study claims.Enjoying a small tipple regularly and in moderation improves women’s chances of avoiding heart disease, diabetes and other mental and physical disorders in later life, researchers found.

A study of 14,000 female nurses found that those who frequently drank one to two drinks a night, but no more, had a 30 per cent better chance of overall good health in their seventies than those who avoided alcohol altogether.

Drinking moderate amounts of alcohol on a nightly basis was shown to be healthier than indulging just once or twice a week.

Women who drank on five to seven nights a week enjoyed a 50 per cent better chance of good health in later life than teetotallers.

Writing in the Public Library of Science journal, the researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston said their work showed that “regular, moderate consumption of alcohol” in their fifties could boost overall health among women who survive into their seventies.

Experts cautioned that the study did not prove that alcohol is good for the body and claimed the results could have been down to other lifestyle factors.

Associate Prof Jayne Lucke of the University of Queensland, Australia, said: “Drinking a small amount of alcohol may not cause women to age healthily.

“Rather women who regularly drink a small amount may also have a number of other characteristics, such as good health, an active social life and a healthy appetite, that all work together to promote successful ageing.”

NHS guidelines state that women should not regularly drink more than two or three units of alcohol a day, equal to one and a half standard 175ml glasses of wine or one pint of lager.

A study published last year by researchers in Paris indicated that moderate drinkers had lower rates of heart disease, obesity and depression than people who were teetotal.

The new findings showed that even drinking small amounts of alcohol can have a significant impact on health in later life.

The American researchers measured alcohol intake in grams rather than units, with a glass of wine equal to about 10g and a bottle of beer including 13g.

The results showed that women with an average age of 58 who drank between 5 and 15g per night had a 20 per cent better chance of good health than non-drinkers, while those who drank 15g to 30g were 30 per cent more likely to be healthy in old age.

Dr Qi Sun, who led the study, said: “Low to moderate consumption of alcohol will slightly improve health for women in old age. We would still only recommend regular consumption of one drink per day because that is what the US health guidelines are.”

But European guidelines are slightly higher and previous British studies have that as many as two drinks a night can have a positive health effect, he said.

Dr Sun added: “Even at moderate drinking levels it is highly recommended that you consume alcohol on a regular basis rather than binge drinking at the weekend.

“But for lifetime non-drinkers we would not recommend drinking alcohol just to improve health, because studies have shown that regular exercise and healthy body weight are much more associated with better health at old age than alcohol.”

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Daily-tipple-boosts-health-in-old-age

Drinking just a glass of wine a day may actually help weight loss researchers now believe. In a study that will raise the spirits of anyone driven to stick to soft drinks for the sake of their waistline, academics say previous assumptions about a link between alcohol and obesity have been inaccurate.

Their analysis of previous research shows that although heavy drinkers are likely to put on weight, those who just enjoy an occasional tipple are unlikely to pile on the pounds.

In fact, connoisseurs of less fattening drinks such as wine may even lose weight as well as being at lower risk of developing diabetes.

“Light-to-moderate alcohol intake, especially wine intake, may be more likely to protect against weight gain, whereas consumption of spirits has been positively associated with weight gain,” says the paper by researchers at Navarro University in Spain, which has been reviewed by the International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research.

The paper, published in the journal Nutrition Reviews, states that “alcohol consumption can lead to weight gain” as 1 gram of alcohol has an energy content of 7.1 calories.

But analysis of 31 studies published between 1984 and 2010 found they were “contradictory” and did not “conclusively confirm” a link between drinking and weight gain.

The papers that did find a link tended to involve studies of heavy drinking, so the Spanish researchers suggest: “It is possible that heavy drinkers may experience such an effect more commonly than light drinkers.”

They say more research should be carried out into the role of “different types of alcoholic beverages”. A pint of lager contains about 200 calories, twice as many as in a glass of wine.

“The type of alcoholic beverage might play an important role in modifying the effect of alcohol consumption on weight gain.”

Members of the forum, commenting on the new paper, agree: “While it is common for individuals, especially women, to state that they avoid all alcohol consumption because they ‘do not want to gain weight,’ data are very limited on this subject.”

They cite studies that show heavy drinking is linked to weight gain but regular drinking is not: “These results suggest that the frequent consumption of small amounts of alcohol is the optimal drinking pattern associated with a lower risk of obesity.”

Other research has suggested that moderate drinkers are at 30 per cent lower risk of developing diabetes, and that even obese people should not abstain from alcohol for this reason.

Moderate drinkers have also been found to be at between 16 per cent and 25 per cent lower risk of developing metabolic syndrome, which in turn makes them more likely to have a stroke or coronary artery disease.

Research on the effects of alcohol on weight has also been complicated by the fact that heavy drinkers have traditionally also smoked cigarettes, which lower the risk of obesity.

Few studies have looked at diet, previous weight gain or loss or “binge drinking” among subjects.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Moderate-wine-drinking-may-help-promote-weight-loss

The Government’s drugs spending watchdog has decided that the first pill to treat multiple sclerosis (MS) is too costly to be prescribed on the NHS.The draft decision dashes the hopes of thousands of sufferers with the auto-immune disease who receive little benefit from current drugs.

There was enormous excitement among Britain’s 100,000 MS sufferers in January when EU drugs regulators gave fingolimod preliminary marketing approval.

Novartis, which markets fingolimod under the brand name Gilenya, subsequently applied for it to be prescribed on the NHS in situations where existing drugs do not work.

To receive these drugs, called interferon therapy, patients either have to self-inject every few days or go to hospital for supervised infusions.

A trial, published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that fingolimod halved the number of disabling relapses compared with interferon beta.

However, the National Institute of Curbing Expenditure (Nice) has decided that – at £20,000 a year – fingolimod “would not be a cost effective use of NHS resources”.

Prof Carole Longson from Nice said: “Unfortunately our independent committee wasn’t given sufficient evidence to show that fingolimod could reduce relapses considerably better than the other treatments currently being used.”

MS charities last night said the decision was “disappointing”.

Simon Gillespie, chief executive of the MS Society, warned: “It will leave some people with no effective treatment option.”

He added: “Access to MS treatments in the UK is very poor – in fact people with MS would be better off living almost anywhere else in Europe, and this decision will only deepen that inequality.”

The German health service is already paying for 2,000 people to receive fingolimod for highly active relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS).

Fingolimod is an immumosuppressant and, while it is well tolerated by most patients, it does have side effects in some.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/MS-pill-rejected-as-too-costly-by-Nice.html

Drinks industry lobbyists now make up almost half the members of a key body tasked with advising ministers on alcohol policy, research papers show.
Seven out of 16 members of the Government and Partners Alcohol Working Group are from industry, up from just a couple last autumn.

Critics believe it is evidence that the Coalition is pandering to the interests of the drinks industry, potentially at the expense of the nation’s health.

Some nine million people in Britain suffer from the harms of alcohol in some, either directly or indirectly, while the cost to the NHS stands at £2.7 billion a year.

Don Shenker, chief executive of the charity Alcohol Concern, believed companies were being allowed a bigger say in “setting the agenda” under the Coalition.

Speaking of the changes to the working group “I can only imagine it’s because this government believes that the drinks industry has a big role to play in shaping policy, in setting the agenda.

“And so they have extended the invitations to a larger set of people from the drinks industry.”

However, Anne Milton, the Public Health Minister, claimed ignorance of the body.

She said: “I think we have a communications problem in Whitehall because you know something that I have never heard of before.”

In opposition David Cameron talked tough on alcohol abuse, and the Conservatives’ manifesto said the party would ban off-licences and supermarkets from selling alcohol below cost price.

In January the Coalition announced that retailers would be banned from selling drinks for less than the value of duty and VAT.

But they will not have to take into account the cost of producing the drinks, meaning they will still be able to sell drinks at a net loss.

The Coalition has pursued an approach of working with industry, arguing it will be more effective than legislation.

However, in March eight organisations pulled out of the Coalition’s Public Health Responsibility Deal – including Alcohol Concern, the Institute of Alcohol Studies and the British Liver Trust.

They wrote to Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, saying the deal on alcohol – which includes voluntary agreements with industry – would not help reduce illness or deaths.

At the time Mr Lansley said imposing laws was often “costly” and they could “take years” to implement.

A spokesman for the Department of Health yesterday re-iterated that argument.

She did not deny that changes to the working group had been made.

The spokesman said: “We are committed to challenging the assumption that the only way to change people’s behaviour is through adding to rules and regulations.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Alcohol-advisory-body-stacked-with-drinks-industry-lobbyists

Government policies for treating drug addicts in England are flawed and “doomed to failure”, a think tank says.
The Centre for Policy Studies says rehabilitation is a better use of the £3.6bn now spent on treating users with drug substitutes like methadone and keeping them on benefits each year.

But it says plans to reward groups which treat addicts so they can return to work are open to manipulation.

The Department of Health said it aimed to get users “off drugs for good”.

The coalition government wants to change the way drug addiction is tackled, with more people with problems diverted away from prison and into treatment as part of what it calls a “rehabilitation revolution”.

Part of this involves rewarding treatment providers who show addicts have improved their health and employment prospects.

A report from the right-of-centre think tank, which has links to the Conservative Party, says these payment by results schemes were being run by the very organisations “responsible for the current failure of policy”.

It says the current annual cost of maintaining treatment for 320,000 problem drug users is made up of £1.7bn in benefits, £1.2bn for looking after their children and £730m for prescribing the heroin substitute methadone.

Kathy Gyngell, Centre of Policy Studies: “The Department of Health has been paying 153,000 people to be on methadone”

The think tank calls for “a real transfer of power from large distant organisations to small innovative providers” for rehabilitation.

It says such units have a better chance of getting addicts off drugs completely, adding: “There is one simple measure of success: That of six months abstinence from drugs.”

According to the report’s author Kathy Gyngell, chairwoman of the prisons and addictions policy forum at the CPS, prescribing methadone to addicts delays their recovery.

She told the BBC: “The state is subsidising people to be any number of years on methadone, which has turned out not to be a cheap option and will only subsidise the tiniest proportion – 2% – to go into a rehabilitation unit that would actually free them from dependency and allow them to live their life.”

A Department of Health spokesman said: “The 2010 Drug Strategy is fundamentally different from those that have gone before.

“Instead of focusing primarily on reducing the harms caused by drug misuse, our approach will be to go much further and offer every support for people to choose recovery as an achievable way out of dependence.”

He added: “Work is under way to support local recovery systems tailored to the needs of communities, many of which are already showing positive results.”

From: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13826759

Health Direct has for a long time noted the costly failure that is the current policy on drugs. On August 02, 2006 in Risks of taking drugs compared- Scientific review of dangers of drugtaking- Drugs, the real deal

we reproduced the first ranking based upon scientific evidence of harm to both individuals and society.

It was devised by government advisers – then ignored by ministers because of its controversial findings.

The analysis was carried out by David Nutt, the then senior member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, and Colin Blakemore, the chief executive of the Medical Research Council.
http://www.healthdirect.co.uk/2006/08/risks-of-taking-drugs-compared.html

Legal highs are becoming a bigger problem than illegal drugs with many young people wrongly believing they are safe.
Alan Andrews, an ex-heroin addict who runs a Llanelli-based drug intervention centre, said some legal drugs were stronger than illegal counterparts.

The programme has investigated the issue of legal highs, more than a year after the drug mephedrone, or meow meow, was banned.

Legal highs are substances that are manufactured in a laboratory which do not fall under the current legislation of banned substances under the Misuse of Drugs Act, according to Dr Mohan Da Silva, lead clinician for charity Kaleidoscope Wales.

Undercover recording has found shops breaking the law by selling some of these drugs for human consumption.

Mr Andrews, managing director of Chooselife, said: “It’s becoming a bigger problem than illegal drugs because… the message ‘legal’ means safe, which it’s not.

He said some of the legal high drugs “are stronger, more potent than the illegal drugs and it’s quite scary. There’s a generation of young people who are being sold a lie that legal means safe.”

“There has been a lot of talk about whether things are appropriately classified and I think the development of these new compounds at the rate they’re being developed probably warrants a second look at how we control all drugs,” he said.

Legal highs are not new but there are more of them and there are concerns they are getting more potent.

Last month the monitoring centre which records drug use across Europe said new highs were appearing at an “unprecedented” pace.

Some 41 new substances emerged in 2010, 16 of which were first reported in the UK.

The most high profile has been mephedrone, which has been linked to a number of young people’s deaths.

The UK government is planning to bring in temporary banning orders, to allow time for legal highs to be tested.

From: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-13846006

The number of people living with HIV in Britain will top 100,000 for the first time next year.The toll of those infected announced by the Health Protection Agency (HPA), is revealed as the world marks 30 years since the first cases of the disease were diagnosed.

The growing number of British HIV patients is due to the spread of the disease within the UK, as opposed to infections acquired abroad.

The amount of people contracting the disease in Britain each year has doubled in the past decade, with some 3,800 diagnosed last year.

Epidemiologists at the HPA now predict that there will be more than 100,000 HIV-positive people – diagnosed and undiagnosed – in Britain by the end of 2012.

Health professionals said yesterday that Britain’s progress towards this figure is more of a cause for optimism than it might first appear. They argued that the high numbers illustrate that in three decades, HIV has moved from something akin to a death sentence to a condition that – if managed – can allow sufferers a normal life expectancy.

Dr Valerie Delpech, the HPA’s head of national HIV surveillance, said: “It’s remarkable to be heading towards 100,000 people alive with HIV. In the early days, when we were diagnosing we were also counting as many deaths. That’s changed dramatically. It’s an extraordinary leap in medicine, that means we’ve gone from a fatal disease to a manageable chronic disease with a normal life expectancy – if you catch it early.”

Since the first cases were discovered in Los Angeles 30 years ago, 115,000 people have been diagnosed in the UK. Of these, 27,000 have developed full-blown Aids and 20,000 have died.

But prevention is still a cause for concern as the doubling of cases suggests that safe sex campaigns are not hitting home.

Despite the increase in the number of diagnoses, the budget for HIV services in London has been cut by 20 per cent: the chief executives of London primary care trusts slashed spending for 2011-12 by £516,000, prompting protests from public health experts.

The majority of new infections are diagnosed in gay men or in people who contracted the disease while abroad, although the number of heterosexuals diagnosed is also increasing.

If all the UK-acquired infections were prevented, some £1.2bn could be saved in lifetime treatment costs.

Sir Nick Partridge, chief executive of the Terrence Higgins Trust, said: “Clearly, we want to do better in HIV prevention in the UK, particularly among gay men. The numbers would be much higher if we hadn’t had the prevention campaigns of the past 25 years, and nine out of 10 gay men now use condoms.

“But in the past 10 years there’s been a year-on-year decrease in local funding of HIV prevention work. The national programme has been sustained, but cutting local services adds to the invisibility of HIV.”

Although the condition is now manageable if retroviral drugs are available and there is an early diagnosis, a cure is still a long way off, and patients in many countries do not have access to any treatment.

From: http://www.independent.co.uk/hiv-thirty-years-after-the-first-diagnosis-britain-heads-for-100000-cases