Governments in Europe should impose much higher taxes on alcohol and unhealthy food to tackle the continent’s 284,000 deaths a year from liver disease, experts say.
Taxes on those products should rise sharply enough for the money raised to cover the huge costs they place on health services, the criminal justice system and social services.
The call for tough action on common causes of serious liver disease comes from a commission of experts from the European Association for the Study of the Liver and the Lancet medical journal.
They are urging governments in Europe to ensure all alcoholic products carry health warnings and stop under-18s being targeted with online advertisements for alcoholic drinks and junk food.
Bold steps are needed to combat “an escalating and unsustainable burden of liver disease”, the commission says in a report published on Wednesday in the Lancet.
The experts call on the EU and World Health Organization to encourage national governments in Europe to implement their recommendations. They say governments should learn lessons from the successful fight against smoking over recent decades and urgently address what the WHO calls the “commercial determinants of health” – producers of tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed food and fossil fuels promoting products that the UN’s health arm believes kill 2.7 million people a year in Europe.
Governments should “align taxation of alcohol and unhealthy foods to the economic burden they impose, including costs incurred by healthcare systems, law enforcement, the justice system and social services”, the commission says.
Urgent action on common causes of liver disease is overdue, its members say, given that 215,000 people a year across Europe die from liver cirrhosis – which is closely linked to alcohol – and another 69,400 from liver cancer. Together those two conditions cause 780 deaths a day, about 3% of all deaths in Europe, they calculate.
The experts identify four main causes of liver-related death: alcohol, unhealthy diets, obesity and viral hepatitis. Eliminating “behavioural risk factors”, such as drinking too much and eating a poor diet, could halve the prevalence of liver disease and would also reduce the number of people who develop heart disease, diabetes and cancer, they add.
If implemented, the commission’s call for swingeing rises in alcohol taxation to reduce consumption would result in beer, wine and spirits costing far more.
In recent years the Institute of Alcohol Studies thinktank has urged the chancellor of the exchequer to use their budget to impose much higher taxes on alcohol products and ensure that “alcohol duty rates should be based on the economic cost of alcohol harm to society”.
Jem Roberts, the institute’s head of external affairs, argued after Rachel Reeves’s last budget in December that duty on beer should rise by 68%, duty on cider by 227%, duty on spirits by 68% and duty on wine by 34% to achieve that aim – increases he conceded “may seem ridiculously high”.
He calculated that if the impact of such rises were fully passed through to the retail cost, the price of a 15-pack of 4.6% ABV beer cans would increase from £14.59 to £19.51, the cost of an 18-pack of 4.5% ABV cider cans would jump from £13.99 to £22.54 and a bottle of 12.5% ABV wine would go from £8.75 to £9.82. Roberts said the new prices would bring England into line with prices in Scotland, which brought in minimum unit pricing of alcohol in 2018.
Pamela Healy, the chief executive of the British Liver Trust, backed the experts’ plea for higher taxation. “We urgently need policies that reflect the true harm caused by our unhealthy food and alcohol environment,” she said. “This is not about creating a nanny state; it is about creating a level playing field.”
Matt Lambert, the chief executive of the alcohol industry body the Portman Group, said the best way to tackle alcohol-related harm was by promoting moderate and responsible use and targeted interventions for those who drank too much, “rather than penalise the moderate majority whilst doing little to help those drinking at the heaviest rates”.
He added: “We would caution against a kneejerk demonisation of an entire industry, which works with us to ensure alcohol marketing is responsible and promotes labelling which carries the NHS low-risk drinking guidelines, which has been voluntarily adopted by a large majority of the industry.”
