Alcohol Issues - Alcohol's (and the Alcohol Industry's) Role in the NCDs Tsunami

Alcohol Issues - Episode 6

Alcohol's (and the Alcohol Industry's) Role in the NCDs Tsunami

Movendi International's weekly conversation about the latest alcohol issues in policy and science and new alcohol industry revelations.

For this sixth episode, we are talking with Nina Renshaw. Nina is the Policy and Advocacy Director at the NCD Alliance, based in Geneva in the heart of global health policy-making.

In my conversation with Nina, we talk about alcohol’s role as risk factor in the global NCDs tsunami and what the NCD Alliance is doing about it. And Nina shares insights into the advocacy environment during and after the coronavirus crisis with regard to attention to non-communicable diseases and their risk factors. We discuss some of the most recent scientific findings about the preventable healthcare costs of NCDs risk factors and shed more light on the concept of commercial determinants of health.

With Nina, we enjoyed a far-reaching conversation and some really deep dives into the topics of NCDs, alcohol, industry interference and advocacy for high-impact policy solutions. And to top it all off, Nina shares her powerful and inspiring thoughts on the most important advocacy issues.

This week we highlight three alcohol issues that we think deserve special attention. In policy news, we talk about Canada during COVID-19 and how rising alcohol use is fueling mental health problems and what all that says about the country’s alcohol policy situation. In this week’s Science Digest we look at new research showing just how much healthcare spending could be prevented through policy action on health risk factors such as alcohol. And in the Big Alcohol Watch we expose how Big Alcohol uses the illusion of small-scale alcohol production in the Swedish countryside to lobby for the undoing of the successful Swedish alcohol policy model.

Resources for the conversation with Nina Renshaw Follow Nina on Twitter. Follow the NCD Alliance on Twitter.

1. Healthcare Spending Attributable to Modifiable Risk Factors in the USA

   Read more here...

2. New Resource: Alcohol and NCDs – Harm and Solutions

   Read more here...
3. NCDs risk factors and prevention. Read more here...
4. Signalling Virtue, Promoting Harm: Unhealthy commodity industries and COVID-19, authored by the NCD Alliance and the SPECTRUM Consortium. Read more here...

More about NCD Alliance advocacy can be found here. Resources for the weekly alcohol issues update

1. Canada and COVID-19: As Alcohol Use Rises, Mental Health Worsens

   Read more here...

2. Health-Care Spending Attributable to Modifiable Risk Factors in the USA: An Economic Attribution Analysis

   Read the research article here...

3. IOGT-NTO Exposes Big Alcohol’s Trojan Horse: “Farm Sales” Benefit Multinational Alcohol Industry Giants, Not Small Local Producers

   Read more here...

For feedback, questions and suggestions of future topics, please get in touch at: info@movendi.ngo And here is the Alcohol Issues Newsletter for week 42.