Challenges and Opportunities Implementing the WHO Global Strategy on Alcohol

Donald W. Zeigler, American Medical Association
Thomas F. Babor, University of Connecticut School of Medicine, Farmington, CT Introduction In May 2010, the World Health Assembly of the World Health Organization (WHO) adopted a resolution to support a global strategy to reduce the harmful use of alcohol (WHO 2010b), based on estimates of alcohol’s contribution to the global burden of disease and on evidence showing the effectiveness of policies designed to reduce the harm it causes (Babor et al. 2010; Room, Babor, and Rehm 2005; Anderson, Chisholm, and Fuhr 2009). Now that the strategy has been adopted, it is time for the world medical community to meet two new challenges. The first is to support an expansion of the evidence base so that it applies not just to the western developed countries where most of the world’s alcohol research is concentrated, but also to other regions of the world where alcohol consumption is increasing and where the policy response is still relatively weak. The second challenge is to use scientific research to guide the adoption of effective alcohol policies at the national level in all WHO Member States. The purpose of this paper is to review the role of scientific research and public health advocacy in the adoption of the global strategy, describe the actual contents of the strategy, and discuss its implications for alcohol policy in countries throughout the world, especially in the context of new global attention to noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and social determinants of health.

Challenges_and_Opportunities_Implementing_the_WHO_Global_Alcohol_Strategy.pdf