U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has called for cancer risk warnings to be included on alcoholic beverage labels. The Surgeon said that alcohol consumption increases the risk of at least seven types of cancer, including breast, colon and liver cancer, but most US consumers remain unaware of this.
The surgeon also called to reassess guidelines for alcohol consumption limits in order to held people to consider the cancer risks when deciding whether or how much to drink.
"Alcohol consumption is the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States, after tobacco and obesity," Murthy's office said in a statement accompanying the new report, adding the type of alcohol consumed does not matter, as quoted by Reuters.
The report also highlighted that higher alcohol consumption increases cancer risks, with two drinks a day leading to about five additional women and three more men per 100 developing cancer.
The Surgeon General's advisory said alcohol is responsible for 100,000 US cancer cases and 20,000 cancer deaths each year, and more than the 13,500 alcohol-associated traffic crash deaths.
President-elect Donald Trump and his nominee to run the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., do not drink and have been outspoken about the dangers of alcohol. But neither rushed to embrace the recommendation by the outgoing Biden administration that alcoholic beverages carry warning labels about cancer risk.
Brian Darling, a Republican strategist and former senior aide to U.S. Senator Rand Paul, does not see the new Republican-controlled Congress approving adding a cancer-risk label to alcohol.
"I can't imagine that a Republican Congress would act like the nanny state and force labels on alcohol beverages saying that they may cause cancer," he said. "It just seems completely inconsistent with freedom and everything that the party stands for.”
(With inputs from Reuters)
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