A 21-year-old man in Karnataka has died after he drank five bottles of liquor neat over a Rs 10,000 bet with his friends. Karthik had told his friends Venkata Reddy, Subramani, and three others that he could drink five full bottles of liquor without diluting alcohol with water. Venkata Reddy had told Karthik he would give him Rs 10,000 if he could do that.
Karthik downed the five bottles but became critically ill soon after. He was admitted to a hospital at Mulbagal in Kolar district. He succumbed during treatment. Karthik was married for a year and his wife had delivered a child just eight days back.
A police case has been filed at Nangali police station against six individuals, including Venkata Reddy and Subramani. Both have been arrested, and the cops are looking for the other accused.
Nearly 2.6 million people die of alcohol consumption every year, accounting for 4.7 per cent of global deaths, according to the World Health Organization.
According to the WHO, there is no "safe" level of alcohol consumption. "To identify a 'safe' level of alcohol consumption, valid scientific evidence would need to demonstrate that at and below a certain level, there is no risk of illness or injury associated with alcohol consumption. The new WHO statement clarifies: currently available evidence cannot indicate the existence of a threshold at which the carcinogenic effects of alcohol 'switch on' and start to manifest in the human body.
Moreover, there are no studies that would demonstrate that the potential beneficial effects of light and moderate drinking on cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes outweigh the cancer risk associated with these same levels of alcohol consumption for individual consumers," a 2023 report says.
"We cannot talk about a so-called safe level of alcohol use. It doesn't matter how much you drink - the risk to the drinker's health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage. The only thing that we can say for sure is that the more you drink, the more harmful it is - or, in other words, the less you drink, the safer it is," explains Dr Carina Ferreira-Borges, acting Unit Lead for Noncommunicable Disease Management and Regional Advisor for Alcohol and Illicit Drugs in the WHO Regional Office for Europe.
