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The University of Southampton
University of Southampton Global Health Research Institute

A Hitchhiker's Guide to Alcohol, the Liver and Everything Event

Origin: 
Interdisciplinary Research Excellence
Alcohol
Time:
17:15
Date:
17 March 2016
Venue:
Lecture Theatre 2, South Academic Block, Southampton General Hospital

For more information regarding this event, please email deanmed@soton.ac.uk .

Event details

Professor Nick Sheron will be presenting his inaugural lecture.

Fifteen thousand years ago the Natufians invented agriculture and hence civilisation, probably in order to get pissed. Four thousand five hundred years ago the first ever work of literature featured a binge drinking monarch, who as a result had an unfortunate sexual encounter. Just over two thousand years ago Cleopatra invented the first alcohol tax and three hundred years ago London experienced the first ever recorded industrial alcohol epidemic of alcohol poisoning, as a result of government deregulation. 

Over the last 30 years deaths from alcohol-related liver disease have increased by four times and liver disease now kills more people under the age of 50 than cancer of the lung, bronchus, oesophagus, stomach, colon, rectum and pancreas combined. Decades of basic science, molecular biology and thousands of dead animals have got us precisely nowhere; there is still not a single drug proven to reduce the mortality of alcohol related liver disease. Liver disease is the second leading killer of women of working age in the UK, and yet the solutions are quite straightforward. The new diseases of the 21st century can be framed as the diseases of unhealthy behaviours, or unhealthy environments, or health inequalities, or healthy corporate profits and shareholder returns depending upon who is doing the framing...

In this talk some inconvenient truths will be revealed, small particles of original research will be unearthed and an attempt will be made to answer an ultimate question about the liver, the universe and everything.

Which for the record is not 42 but might just turn out to be…

 

*Refreshments will be served from 16.45 in the Lecture theatre foyer with the lecture itself, commencing at 17.15. This will be followed by a wine and canapes reception till 19:00.

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