The alcohol industry is endangering the lives of young people with advertising that glamorizes drinking, contributing to a worsening and "tragic" public health crisis, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today.
"Our youth are a key target of the marketing practices of the alcohol industry," WHO Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland said in an opening day speech to delegates attending a three-day conference on youth and alcohol.
"The large alcohol manufacturers are trying to establish a habit of drinking alcohol at a very young age," she said.
Evidence of the drive by alcohol manufacturers to encourage young people to drink was easy to find in the media in many countries and notably on the Internet web sites of leading alcoholic beverage companies, Ms Brundtland said.
She cited studies which showed that five minutes of alcohol-related advertising on television had been linked to a significant increase in alcohol consumption by young people who see the ads.
And she pointed to statistics which revealed that one in four deaths of men between the ages of 15 and 29 in Europe - one in three, in parts of eastern Europe - was due to alcohol.
"We need to strengthen our work to counter these influences," Ms Brundtland said, referring to marketing practices used by alcohol industry leaders to encourage youthful drinking.
Most European countries had introduced or strengthened legislation designed to make it harder for underage drinkers to acquire alcohol, according to WHO data.
But many countries are not adequately enforcing these measures and others were not supplementing laws designed to keep youths away from alcohol with restrictions on advertising to help reduce this demand, conference leaders said.
WHO said Greece, Hungary and Romania had no controls of any kind in any mass media on alcohol advertising, while the prohibition on alcohol advertising for the French community in Belgium applies only to alcoholic beverages containing more than 10 per cent alcohol by volume.
AFP