One glass may be one too many

Kirk Hargreaves

Living dangerously: Alice Blair, left, and Hannah Scott, enjoy a drink at Christchurch's Minx last night. They were surprised to hear of the new research on links between alcohol and cancer.

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Enjoying a glass of wine each evening increases a woman's risk of developing cancer.

Far from being healthy, alcohol is now known to be a significant factor in a range of cancers, particularly breast cancer.

It is now being attributed to causing 11 per cent of all breast cancer or 260 cases a year in New Zealand.

Hannah Scott and Alice Blair, both 18, were surprised to learn of the link between alcohol and cancer.

The pair were celebrating Scott's 18th birthday with a couple of cocktails at Minx in Christchurch last night.

Blair said the research would not scare her into becoming a teetotaller "because everything seems to give you cancer these days".

"Cellphones, alcohol, everything," she said.

Doug Sellman, a professor of psychiatry and addiction medicine at the Christchurch School of Medicine, said few people realised alcohol caused cancer.

In fact, it has been classified by the World Health Organisation as a Class 1 carcinogen, meaning it is "definitely carcinogenic".

The same list includes asbestos, formaldehyde, mustard gas and plutonium-239.

Sellman said alcohol killed about 1000 people a year half from accidents but half from chronic disease such as cancer.

His comments come after this week's release of a British study of over 1 million women that found alcohol was to blame for about 13 per cent of breast, liver, rectum, mouth and throat cancers.

The seven-year study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, looked specifically at women who drank three drinks a day or fewer.

It found that women who had as little as one drink a day increased their risk of all types of cancer by 6 per cent, although this varied depending on the cancer.

The statistics showed that for every 1000 women who drank one glass a day, there would be 11 extra cases of breast cancer, one extra case of mouth and rectal cancer and 0.7 each for cancers of the gullet, throat and liver.

While the study focused on women, Sellman said alcohol exposed both genders to cancers where the liquid touched the linings of the mouth, throat and oesophagus.

Sellman criticised past research that endorsed a glass of wine a day for health, saying it had been funded by alcohol companies. He said the rate of regular heavy drinking could be reduced by raising the drinking age back to 20, banning supermarket sales, raising the price and increasing the amount of drink-driving surveillance.

- © Fairfax NZ News