Southerners' drink problem

People in the North are reforming their traditional hard-drinking image, according to new figures which show, for the first time, that more Southerners than Northerners are undergoing hospitalisation for serious drink problems.

The South accounted for 8,537 alcohol-dependency cases treated in English hospitals last year, compared with 8,008 cases in the North. The figures represented a substantial increase on the previous year, when there were 7,466 cases in the South, and 7,728 in the North. Most of the cases reported to Alcohol Concern and presented at its conference in London yesterday, involved men (14,422) while women accounted for 6,287.