In 1988, alcohol was added to the list of Group 1 carcinogens by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, alongside tobacco, asbestos, radiation, and viral infections such as HIV and HPV. This classification, put simply, means that alcohol causes cancer. Yet public awareness of this remains remarkably low.
Drinking alcohol is known to cause at least seven types of cancer: mouth, upper throat, voice box, food pipe, breast, liver, and bowel cancer, and there is increasing evidence that it may be linked to pancreatic cancer.
Each year in the UK, alcohol causes as many cancer deaths as deaths from alcohol-related liver disease, but how does alcohol cause cancer, how many cases and deaths does it cause, what are the levels of risk, and what can be done to reduce this harm?
Our expert speaker is Professor Linda Bauld, who worked for seven years as Cancer Research UK's cancer prevention adviser.
00:00 - Intro
00:57 - How alcohol causes cancer
02:24 - Risk levels
04:05 - Deaths from alcohol-related cancer
04:36 - Smoking and obesity
05:31 - Alcohol industry misinformation
07:40 - Low public awareness
09:37 - How to reduce alcohol-related cancers
Publications referenced in the film, and other resources:
- Alcohol and cancer factsheet: https://www.who.int/docs/librariesprovider2/default-document-library/alcohol-and-cancer-factsheet-eng.pdf
- Which cancers does alcohol cause and how: https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-cancer/alcohol-and-cancer
- 'How alcohol industry organisations mislead the public about alcohol and cancer': https://iogt.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Petticrew_et_al-2017-Drug_and_Alcohol_Review.pdf
- 'Public awareness of the link between alcohol and cancer in England in 2015: a population-based survey': https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-016-3855-6
- 'How dependent is the alcohol industry on heavy drinking in England?': https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.14386
- 'Contents unknown: How alcohol labelling still fails consumers': https://ahauk.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Labelling_Report_2022_.pdf