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Comment by myth_buster | Hacker News Reader

  600,000 attributed to alcohol each year.

That number is a bit misleading. Does that include the deaths say due to DUI,, liver damage, poisoning?

It ideally shouldn't as we are discussing carcinogens.

Edit: Added additional alcohol related deaths.

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I found numbers for how many cancer deaths in the US are attributable to alcohol [0] and it puts it at 18 200 to 21 300 deaths. For worldwide figures see Table 1 of this study [1] that breaks down alcohol-attributable deaths by category. It lists alcohol-attributable cancer deaths at 487 000 in the year 2004. So it looks like the number isn't misleading, only unclear. Misleading would have been listing the total 2 225 000 alcohol-attributable deaths.

[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3673233/

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673609...

There are only about 30000 fatalities from all car driving per year.

  The report indicates that worldwide the total number of road traffic 
  deaths remains unacceptably high at 1.24 million per year.

http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/road_safety_st...

In America [0] (I thought the other stats were American ones too), it actually says in [1] 480000 cigarette deaths which disagrees with the previous stats of 1 million, but a million isn't enough for the world surely?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/healt...

From the context it seems that it's just about cancer cases but it is very vague and could mean anything.

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