Demand for ban on television alcohol advertising

Doctors' leaders have called for a ban on alcohol advertising to curb the epidemic of binge drinking among young people which is fast becoming a serious threat to their future health.

The call came at the annual conference, held in Torquay, of the British Medical Association. In a challenge to the drinks industry, the power and influence of which is evidenced in the nature of the Licensing Bill soon to reach the statute books, the BMA demanded an end to advertising worth £270m every year promoting sales of beer, wine and spirits.

The head of science for the BMA, Vivienne Nathanson, said the first move should be to prohibit the advertising of alcohol on television.

"Ten years ago we were told we would not be able to secure our aim of banning the advertising of tobacco. We went for television first and we want now to target the inappropriate images that encourage binge drinking," said Dr Nathanson.

This is the first time that the BMA has gone so far as to call for an alcohol advertising ban, but the annual conference overwhelmingly supported a resolution proposed by Leigh Bissett, a medical student at the University of East Anglia.

"Alcohol harms and we want to see the glorification of it upon our television screens ended," said Mr Bisset in his speech at the conference. "Adverts don't say have a glass or two. They portray people getting off their face on alcohol."

He pointed out that 4,000 deaths a year were directly related to alcohol and 28,000 indirectly. "Our casualty departments see increasing workloads and on a Friday and Saturday the extra violence faced by staff is unacceptable. We are not calling for a ban on alcohol, but we want the government to stop the glorification of it on our television screensSome people will argue that a ban would infringe our basic human rights, and contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights [but] as health professionals we have a duty to protect our patients.

Let us send a clear message to the public about how we feel about alcohol and its misuse. Protect our children, protect our population and protect our doctors."

Echoing the remarks by the Government's Chief medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, in his annual report for 2002, Dr Nathanson said that binge drinking was leading to an increasing number of people in their twenties and thirties suffering liver failure. There are already hundreds of cases a year, principally among young men but an upward trend is now clearly observable among young women.

Dr Nathanson added that binge drinking was causing huge damage to many individuals and the cost of liver transplants was a drain on the NHS.

A spokesman for the Portman Group, set up by the industry to promote "sensible" drinking, opposed the idea of an advertising ban.

"The Advertising Standards Authority and the Independent Television Commission already have strict guidelines to protect the public and these are well observed by the alcohol industry," he said.

He went on to claim that the guidelines prevented the showing of anything that would encourage the misuse of alcohol, drinking in inappropriate circumstances or drinking for the wrong reasons.

However, Sir David Carter, who chairs the BMA's board of science and education, also referred to the worrying increase in binge-drinking among the young. "We see more young people with acute and chronic liver toxicity, and end-stage liver disease," he said. "This is a result of binge-drinking."