Busted

Nigel Hawkes has an excellent article up at Straight Statistics looking at Ian Gilmore's recent claims about drinking and liver cirrhosis in the UK.

In short, Gilmore et al., disregarded data from recent years which show rates of cirrhosis plateauing and made a simplistic and very unlikely prediction based on the increase between 1986 and 2003. They also suggested that Britain could reduce rates as sharply as France has in the past without acknowledging that rates in France were 4 times higher in 1975 when the French decline began than our rates are today.

Nigel has some illuminating graphs in his article, but I've also created the graph below for reference (from the same WHO source). Click to enlarge.

This is a very necessary article. Please read it.