A modest proportion of Malawians - 14 per cent - are alcohol drinkers. On the other hand, those who do drink have a high and risky consumption level. These were two of the key conclusions in a report presented to the Malawian Minister of Health Wednesday. The report has mapped drinking habits in Malawi.

The World Bank recently released the report "Risking your Health: Causes, Consequences and Interventions to Prevent Risky Behaviors". It warns that risky behaviors are increasingly prevalent globally, particularly in developing countries, and constitute a growing threat to the health of individuals and their populations.

Controlling non-communicable diseases and road traffic injuries are key public health issues in Africa, concludes a new report from the World Bank. The report recommends population-based interventions to regulate availability and marketing of alcohol to reduce the number of injuries from road traffic.

Non-drinkers make up nearly half the world’s adult population. A paper presented at the GAPC conference in Seoul suggests what the policy implications of this may be, in particular for developing countries which have remarkable high segments of non-drinkers in their populations.

Alcohol is the leading risk factor for death and disability in Southern sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe and in parts of Latin America. This is one of the conclusions from a new calculation of the Global Burden of Disease. The new study is based on figures from 2010 and these figures are compared to a similar study from 1990.

The 2011 issues of the African Journal are now available online in soft copy versions. Click below to see tables of contents and to download pdf versions of the Journal.

The World Drug Report provides an overview of recent trends and the drug situation in terms of production, trafficking and consumption of illegal drugs. The 2012 edition concludes with both stability and worrying trends in the global drug scene.

A new and promising research program on structural drivers of the HIV/AIDS epidemic has now been started under the title STRIVE. The program is highly relevant for alcohol and development discussions, as excessive drinking is one of the four drivers to be examined.

Three papers by professor Diyanath Samarasinghe explore various aspect of alcohol in a development setting. Here he explores the complex connections between alcohol and poverty.