Alcohol-related hospital admissions rocket

LONDON (Reuters) - The number of people admitted to hospitals with alcohol-related illnesses has doubled in the last decade, figures on Thursday revealed, suggesting the country's binge-drinking culture is taking its toll.

Official figures showed there were 207,788 hospital admissions with a "primary or secondary" diagnosis related to alcohol in 2006/7, up from 93,459 in 1995/6.

Deaths directly linked to drinking were also up. In 2006, there were 6,517, up 19 percent on 2001.

The government has been trying to deal with a growing problem of alcohol abuse, which is estimated to cost the NHS up to 1.7 billion pounds a year.

The Department of Health is spending 6 million pounds on an awareness campaign and the Home Office will follow up with a 4 million pound campaign against binge-drinking next month.

The figures from the Information Centre for Health and Social Care are the latest indicator of the growing health and social problems caused by alcohol in Britain.

In December, senior doctors warned that alcohol was also a factor in more than half of violent crimes and a third of domestic violence, with between 780,000 and 1.3 million children affected by their parents' use of alcohol.

There has also been concern that young people are starting to drink at an earlier age and are drinking more.

Thursday's statistics showed that 45 percent of school children aged 11-15 in 2006 had never had a drink, up from 39 percent five years earlier. But 15 percent thought it was acceptable to get drunk at least once a week.