The George Institute welcomes new guidelines announced today from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) for reducing health risks from drinking alcohol. It is the first update since 2009.

Professor Simone Pettigrew, Program Head of Food Policy at The George Institute maintains alcohol is a major cause of preventable disease and death in Australia.

“Alcohol consumption rates are slowly going down – because evidence-based initiatives like this are effective in reducing consumption and improving health,” Professor Pettigrew said.

“We welcome the new guidelines as they better reflect current medical evidence and the health harms associated with alcohol consumption.”

The three guidelines are:

• To reduce the risk of harm from alcohol-related disease or injury, healthy men and women should drink no more than 10 standard drinks a week and no more than 4 standard drinks on any one day. The less you drink, the lower your risk of harm from alcohol.
• To reduce the risk of injury and other harms to health, children and people under 18 years of age should not drink alcohol.
• To prevent harm from alcohol to their unborn child, women who are pregnant or planning a pregnancy should not drink alcohol. For women who are breastfeeding, not drinking alcohol is safest for their babies.

You can see the new guidelines here.

On December 1, 2020 we hosted the first 'Coffee with Latin America' webinar. The topic was ‘Big data and innovative ways of data generation for research’.

Panellists shared perspectives from different regions, to identify unique challenges and solutions for discussion. It was attended by members of the global health community from Argentina, Brazil, China, Columbia, Denmark, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, Sweden, UK, USA and Uraguay.

The format or presentations was quite informal. Each panellist had 10 minutes to present, followed by 5 minutes for questions and discussion with the audience which enabled rapid interaction and clarification.

This series aims to facilitating global collaboration and learning, provide an opportunity for outreach and connection with the global health community.

View the recording here