Today's Avalanche Of Alcohol Scaremongery

Did you notice that today's news stories were littered with articles on drinking and children? Well, the reason the finger-waggers have been so busy is that today was the start of Alcohol Awareness Week 2010, so get ready for a lot more hectoring on alcohol in the coming days.

Oh yeah, and lots more invoking of the chiiildren, because - as if it is something unusual for a fake charity - Alcohol Concern have themed it so.

Alcohol Awareness Week 2010
18-24 October: Alcohol and Childhood

The theme for Alcohol Awareness Week (AAW) 2010 is 'Alcohol and Childhood' in which we ask the question 'is alcohol damaging childhood?

Read that link, it's a free guide to upcoming events. How exciting, eh?

It doesn't cover all of them, though, since other healthist bodies have been encouraged to time their own 'research' to coincide with Alcohol Concern's initiative. For example, the Mail carried this screeching bullshit today.

Youngsters can get drunk for half the price of a bar of chocolate, a worrying new study has found.

Strong cider is available in city centre supermarkets and off-licences for as little as 10p a unit, while lager can be bought for just 26p a pint, researchers found.

The pricing means a woman could drink more than her daily recommended allowance for just 30p - half the price of a standard bar of chocolate.

A 'standard' bar of chocolate, eh? You can't get much more standard than a Mars Bar, which has occasionally even been held up as a benchmark for inflation itself, let alone confectionery pricing. I bought one today for 45p so that's a bit massaged already.

But then, so is the assertion that kids can 'get drunk' on three units of alcohol, the equivalent of about one and a half cans of Carlsberg.

Yes, it's bollocks. A scare story brought to you thanks to quite ridiculously low 'recommended' limits on daily intake which, in turn, are a load of bollocks.

Sleight of hand, laid on top of misdirection, wrapped in a healthy coating of bullshit.

The same method as used by Alcohol Concern in their offering today. The Guardian and - natch - the BBC lapped it up, but let's go with the former.

Parents' drinking is damaging millions of children, say charities

Around 2.6m children in the UK live in a household where at least one parent's drinking puts them at serious risk of neglect

Yep, it is definitely damaging children, according to the - cough - thinking person's rag.

So, unlike the Graun hack, let's read the report [PDF], shall we?

Recent research estimates that 2.6 million children in the UK are living with parents who are drinking hazardously and 705,000 are living with dependent drinkers.3

The '3' points us to the 'recent research', that being this year old study, which puts it slightly differently (emphases mine).

The UK Government definition of binge drinking was calculated for the sample, i.e. 6 or more units in a single drinking occasion for women and 8 or more units for men. This is above (twice) the maximum recommended daily benchmark, stating that 'regular consumption of 2-3 units a day for women and 3-4 units a day for men does not lead to significant health risk'. We adopted the governments' definition of binge drinking as an accepted UK convention - this is not to imply that there is parental risk for all drinkers meeting these criteria

Putting it all together, we find that the true message today is that 2.6m children live in a household where the mother drinks more than two-thirds of a bottle of wine on one night of the week, or the father drinks three pints of Stella on one night of the week.

Yes, it's just more staggering hyperbolic cockwaffle. I mean, who can be stupid enough as to believe this shit?

Anne Milton, the public health minister, said the study "paints a shocking picture [...]"

Yep. Silly question, wasn't it?