Alcohol is responsible for around 80 per cent of deaths from liver disease, but many of these deaths are easily preventable, according to a comment in The Lancet that takes the history of alcohol policy as its evidence base.

As part of the article, the British hepatologists projected the rates of death due to liver disease in Britain based on four different policies. If the UK situation continued as it has done for the past 10 years, some 8,900 additional people would die by 2019 due to liver disease, they said.