Almost half of all deaths of working-age men in Russia are from alcohol abuse, according to a new medical study which says the country's males die in excessive numbers not just because they drink lots of vodka but because they also consume products containing alcohol, such as eau de cologne, antiseptics and medicinal tinctures. Some of the products contain 95 percent alcohol by volume, equating to 200 proof.
An international group of scientists looked at a single city in the Urals to establish the effects of the drinking in Russia. Izhevsk was chosen for being a typical industrial city where life is much the same as elsewhere and where death rates match the Russian average.
Underlying the work was the question of why life expectancy in Russia is so low: In 2004 it was 59 years for men and 72 for women. Due to the low life expectancy and birthrate, the population in Russia is falling by 700,000 a year.
Alcohol has always been an important factor in death and disease in Russia, borne out by fluctuations in the death rates linked to changes in lifestyle and politics, says a report on the study, in the Lancet medical journal.
"President [Mikhail] Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign in the mid-1980s was associated with an immediate rise in life expectancy, whereas increased alcohol consumption has been linked to rising mortality in the early 1990s during the transition from communism. Deaths related to alcohol, such as acute alcohol poisoning and liver cirrhosis, showed the greatest fluctuations, with similar trends for other causes plausibly linked to alcohol consumption," the report said.
RECORD SETTERS
A study published last year found that Russians, and inhabitants of other former parts of the Soviet Union, drank more than anybody else in the world -- an estimated 15.2 liters of pure alcohol per capita each year for those over age 15. They also drank more dangerously and were prone to binges, known as zapoi, meaning two or more days of continuous drunkenness.
David Leon, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and colleagues examined records and interviewed the families of 1,750 men who had died in Izhevsk from 2003 to 2005. The men were compared with 1,750 who were still alive. They found that problem drinkers were six times more likely to have died young than those who did not have a drinking problem. The chances of an early death were particularly high for those who got their alcohol from eau de cologne and other unorthodox sources -- they were nine times more likely to die.
The authors say that men impoverished after losing a job through drinking may be forced to resort to drinking household products containing pure alcohol. Among those who were still alive, 47 percent who drank such products were jobless compared with 13 percent who stuck to vodka and beer.
Overall, 43 percent of deaths of men aged 25 to 54 were caused by alcohol, a figure that could be extrapolated to all of Russia because of the typical nature of Izhevsk.
high death rate
An estimate in 2002 put the death toll at 27 percent. The authors say their higher figures could be due to taking into account drinking of household products with very high levels of alcohol, as well as binges.
"Almost half of all deaths in working-age men in a typical Russian city may be accounted for by hazardous drinking," they wrote.
"Our analyses provide indirect support for the contention that the sharp fluctuations seen in Russian mortality in the early 1990s could be related to hazardous drinking as indicated by consumption of non- beverage alcohol," they wrote.
A separate commentary points out that people who get their alcohol from household products often live in poor housing and have bad diets, which could contribute to their chances of an early demise. It added that illegally produced alcoholic beverages are also widely consumed.
NATIONAL TRAGEDY
The Kremlin is acutely aware of the epic scale of alcoholism. Ministers call it a "national tragedy." Although Russian President Vladimir Putin has presided over a period of spectacular economic growth since 2000, he has so far not persuaded Russians to drink less.
The government has recently cracked down on rogue distillers. Last Thursday the federal tax service suspended the license of several factories producing "alcohol and ethyl alcohol products," saying they had not complied with a law requiring data on how much alcohol each bottle holds.
Russian alcoholics -- drinking perfume, aftershave and cheap local alcohol -- face great dangers. In winter, newspapers are invariably full of stories of drunks who have died after falling through icy ponds or collapsing in the snow.
According to figures for 2005, Russia has about 2,348,567 registered alcoholics, and alcohol is being linked to 72 percent of murders, 42 percent of suicides and 52.6 percent of traumatic accidents.
The WHO rates the country as one of the most alcoholic in the world.
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