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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Aneeqah Ferguson, MS¹, Gail Janes, PhD², and Randy Elder, PhD². (1) The Guide to Community Preventive Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Rd., MS-K95, Atlanta, GA 30333, 770-488-2584, ahs4@cdc.gov, (2) Guide to Community Preventive Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road, M/S K-95, Atlanta, GA 30333

Every year, approximately 75,000 persons die from causes related to alcohol consumption. In addition, the estimated economic cost of alcohol use and abuse was about $276 billion in 1995. Numerous authors and advocacy groups have proposed that the tremendous public health burden of excessive alcohol consumption could be reduced by increasing alcohol excise taxes. CDC's Guide to Community Preventive Services recently initiated a systematic review to assess the effectiveness of increased alcohol taxes on excessive alcohol consumption.

This presentation will provide the conceptual approach and methods for this review. As an initial step in this effort, alcohol experts and public health professionals drafted an analytic framework that defines the hypothesized causal relationship between taxes, price, and excessive alcohol consumption. Next stages include a comprehensive search of the literature, abstraction of study results, computation of effect sizes, and analysis of data. Results of this review will provide evidence of the effectiveness of excise taxes on alcohol consumption. Other questions with important public health implications, such as the extent to which changes in alcohol taxes have different effects on consumption in different population subgroups (e.g., underage drinkers; heavy drinkers; moderate drinkers) and on consumption of different classes of alcoholic beverages (e.g., beer, wine, spirits) will also be explored.

Final results will be presented to the non-federal Task Force on Community Preventive Services, which will determine whether the evidence for potential public health benefits is sufficient to justify a recommendation for widespread implementation of tax increases.

Learning Objectives: