Friday 8 April 2011

Another Day, Another Lie

It seems like only yesterday that I was bemoaning the fact that the real life decline in alcohol consumption is continually being reported as a fantasy rise. Oh hold on, it was only yesterday.

Still, today is a new day, and just as the sun rises and sets, so does the same blatant lie go unchallenged again at the BBC.

Cancer Research UK director of health information Sara Hiom said that many people did not know that drinking alcohol could increase their cancer risk.

"In the last 10 years, mouth cancer has become much more common and one reason for this could be because of higher levels of drinking"
Liar.

And again here.

"If people are drinking more - and rates have gone up in the last decade or so [...]"
Liar.

It's not like the Beeb were unaware of the truth, because they reported the complete opposite only two months ago. Oh yes, they did.


They even provided a handy graph of official ONS statistics, you know, to make it clearer for public health idiots.


It's a sure sign that the alcohol denormalisation process is rapidly moving into top gear when blatant untruths are thrown out there without a care in the world. Time for the drinks industry to either cower in the corner, or pull out some heavy artillery.

Which is it to be, d'you reckon?


14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jolly good that you picked up on this
"research".
Keep up the good work.

Frank Davis said...

Which is it to be, d'you reckon?

Oh, wild guess. Cower in the corner.

Anonymous said...

BII bids to win over health lobby 'evangelists' - Publican 2010

"Chief executive Neil Robertson to work more closely with anti-alcohol brigade.
Trade group the BII has pledged to work more closely with the health lobby in a bid to change the nature of the debate around alcohol.

In an interview with The Publican, chief executive Neil Robertson explained that he wanted to be able to promote the pub to opinion formers.
Part of this will involve sitting on the Department of Health’s Coalition for Better Health Alcohol Leadership Group with Drinkaware's Chris Sorek, parliamentary figures and health chiefs.

“This is the Department of Health bringing together the medics and the ‘evil ones’ to talk about what works," Robertson said.
“At the moment, health chiefs lob scientific stones at us and some people just fight back saying ‘no you’re wrong’.

"Whereas what we need to say is ‘look we have all got a problem here and we will all fix it together’.

Capitulate, then cower in the corner mumbling apologies.

Rose

James Higham said...

I think we should just head out and get legless. That solves all problems for a few hours.

Anonymous said...

We're now into a small sherry glass of wine is a health hazard territory.

Anyone still remember the days when business people at lunchtime would start with a G&T before moving on to a bottle of wine between two followed by drinks at the bar (or was that just Scotland!)? :0

Jay

Ian R Thorpe said...

I noted (but have not blogged yet) the report on Radio news about the link between alcolhol and cancer.

Apparently 1 in 10 cases of some types of cancer in men is due to alcohol comspumption. 1 in 10. As many as that. So the infinitessimaly small ratio of 9 in 10 are not linked to alcohol.

There was no indication of what age group these 1 in 10 might have been in or if any other factors might be relevant. Like of the 1 in 10 more tan half were over 75

Or: More than half of the group with alcohol related cancers had worked in the chemical indusstry or in jobs that exposed them to noxious fumes for more than 20 years.

It's not just the climate it seems, everything is too complicated for science.

Anonymous said...

They seem to have been trying this for a while.

Alcohol 'as destructive as smoking' - 2005

"Alcohol is as destructive to health worldwide as smoking and high blood pressure, it was claimed today.

Three international experts said alcohol consumption was causally related to more than 60 different medical conditions including breast cancer and heart disease"


Single pint of beer a day ‘poses liver and bowel cancer risk’ - 2008

"Drinking only one pint of beer a day increases the risk of liver and bowel cancer by a fifth, a health expert warned yesterday. A large glass of wine or a couple of spirits can have the same damaging effect, she said."


Drinking just one glass of wine a day can INCREASE risk of cancer by 168%, finds shock new study - 2009

"Drinking even a single glass of wine a day can increase the risk of cancer by 168 per cent, a shocking new French study has found.
Researchers in Paris have destroyed the myth that drinking moderate amounts of red wine can be good for the health.
Instead, experts at the country's National Cancer Institute have warned that even repeated small doses of alcohol can massively increase the risk of getting cancer"


Perhaps Anti-alcohol will encourage
the pubs to look forward to all those new customers who stayed away before because of the alcohol fumes.

Rose

Mark Wadsworth said...

Did you spot the coded message this time:

"Survey methodology changed..."

That's ONS-speak for "These figures are complete bollocks..."

timbone said...

Yes, I heard it, "Research suggests". 'Same old' ... when the feck will the media stop reporting 'suggests' as a top news item.

Of course, the agenda was clear when I heard a woman, yes, a woman, are you surprised? say that everyone, yes everyone should abide by the NHS recommendation re alcohol intake, or better still, stop drinking altogether.

English Pensioner said...

"In the last 10 years, mouth cancer has become much more common and one reason for this could be because of higher levels of drinking"

More likely, of course, it could be due to the ever increasing amounts of chemicals in our foods, either as crop sprays, antibiotics, etc on the farms, or as preservatives (E numbers) during manufacture.

richard hansen said...

"...it could be...", that's the standard then? For chrissakes it could be due to about anything, not? Aside from the FACT that alcohol consumption is NOT increasing - How about an increase in oral sex, or an increase in consumption of fish, or, better yet, an increase in consumption of Government santioned "health foods" - yeah, too many "tofu burgers = oral cancer.

Or, more likely, how about an annoying increase in the publication of moronic drivel from addlebrained healthists with a double digit IQ only surpassed I would suppose by their age, spouting off more and more lies causing clear thinking people to upchuck their lunch thus leading to oral cancer risk.

I would suggest that Ms. Director go suck the chrome off a drunken sailor, then summarily submit herself for oral cancer testing. That way at least someone would "get off" on this idiocy.

Unknown said...

@anon 15:50 It was only yesterday Ian Gilmore said that said that 'self regulation' doesn't work with the drinks industry so it is time that the government took over and hiked up alcohol duty substantially and reviewed their minimum pricing policy.

Hiding in the corner hoping this will go away will hasten their demise.

It's not is if the drinks industry does not have a template to take heed of, remember tobacco control?

Ivan D said...

It is worse than you thought fellow inmates. This definitive paper published in a magazine for medics rather than a scientific journal and published apparently without any actual data from the prospective cohort study other than the total numbers of people who contracted cancers clearly shows that contrary to current opinion there is NO SAFE LEVEL OF ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION

I quote:
“there is no sensible limit below which the risk of cancer is decreased. Therefore, even though light to moderate alcohol consumption might decrease the risk for cardiovascular disease and mortality, the net effect of alcohol is harmful”

How very presumptuous of them bearing in mind the extremely dubious nature of their results and their failure to provide any comparison between cardiovascular and cancer disease burden.

Using this methodology and its underlying assumptions it is almost certainly possible to prove that anything that you can get a grant for studying has no safe limit of consumption. You can be sure that however crap your paper the BMJ will publish and the BBC will cover it provided that it is "on message"

Dick Puddlecote said...

Thanks for that, Ivan, and for your very illuminating comment at Frank Davis's. Apologies for the delay in this appearing here, Blogger's spam filter picked you out as its latest innocent victim unfortunately.