How harmful is alcohol?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
New alcohol guidelines were issued recently which lowered the number of units recommended for safe drinking. But are the benefits and harms of alcohol being jusged correctly? We speak to Professor David Speigelhalter and
Sepsis – do 44,000 people die of it a year? Is it the country's second biggest killer? We speak to Dr Marissa Mason about the difficulties of knowing the numbers.
Dan Bouk tells the story of a statistician who crept around graveyards in South Carolina at the turn of the century recording how long people lived - all to help out an insurance firm. It's from his book 'How our days became numbered' – looking at how data from insurance company has shaped knowledge about our lives.
Have refugees caused a gender imbalance in Sweden or is there something funny going on? It has been reported that there are 123 boys for every 100 girls aged between 16 and 17 in Sweden. In China, the ratio is 117 boys to 100 girls. We explore if the numbers add up and why this might be.
Presenter: Tim Harford Producer: Charlotte McDonald
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Tim Harford. Thank you very much for downloading the Longer Radio 4 edition of |
| 0:05.8 | more or less, first broadcast on the 29th of January. This is all new material, so enjoy it. |
| 0:13.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less, |
| 0:16.0 | your weekly guide to the numbers that surround us in the news and in life. |
| 0:20.0 | This week, have refugees massively skewed the gender ratio in Sweden. |
| 0:26.0 | Can sepsis be one of the leading causes of death when few people have heard of it? |
| 0:31.0 | And we puzzle over why a statistician was creeping around turn of the |
| 0:35.1 | century graveyards in South Carolina. One can only imagine what people thought |
| 0:41.2 | watching this guy neatly dressed in a three-piece suit |
| 0:44.4 | wandering through in the sometimes in the thick summer typing out death dates |
| 0:49.8 | onto a typewriter that he carried around him on his own. |
| 0:54.0 | But first, earlier this month the UK launched new alcohol guidelines. |
| 0:59.0 | They recommended that both men and women should drink no more than 14 units of alcohol a week. |
| 1:04.0 | Which is about six pints of average strength beer or seven medium-sized glasses of wine. |
| 1:09.0 | Well thank you Charlotte I was about to get to that. |
| 1:11.0 | My pleasure. And these guidelines have attracted attention |
| 1:13.7 | partly because it's unusual for men and women to be given the same limits for safe |
| 1:18.6 | drinking. Yes, most European countries have different limits for men and women and our limits are lower than |
| 1:24.6 | in most of the countries for which we have information. |
| 1:27.0 | In France for instance the guidelines are 26 units a week for men and 18 for women. |
| 1:31.9 | The guidelines are the same in Ireland 26 for men, 18 for women. The guidelines are the same in Ireland, 26 for men, 18 for women, and until this |
| 1:35.9 | new announcement there used to be much the same in the UK too. England's chief medical officer |
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