ABSTRACT
Introduction
Alcohol health warning labels are an important part of a comprehensive alcohol policy, but there is a lack of recent implementation data across Europe. This study examined the presence, content and format of health warnings across 13 European countries.
Methods
Store audits were conducted across 32 stores in 23 cities. The sampled products were assessed for the presence, topic and format of health warnings.
Results
Among the 1636 investigated products, 69.7% displayed health warnings. The most common topics were pregnancy (68.0%), drink-driving (21.4%) and age restrictions (16.6%), followed by responsible drinking messages (6.9%) and health harms due to alcohol use (0.3%). About one in four (26.7%) products contained a multi-topic warning. The majority of products featured only a pictogram (62.3%), while 6.7% included both pictogram and text, and 0.7% contained text only. Lithuania, France and the Netherlands had the highest proportions of products displaying at least one warning (above 90%). Proportions were lowest in Croatia, Poland, Slovenia and Greece (under 50% of products with health warnings).
Discussion and Conclusions
Existing warnings predominantly focus on messages relevant to at-risk population groups rather than on alcohol harms affecting the general population. The current implementation largely reflects the alcohol producers’ voluntary commitments, although the highest implementation is found in countries with existing legislation. There is underutilised potential to inform Europeans about the health harms of alcohol through warning labels. Stronger regulatory approaches at the EU or Member State level could improve the quality of information provided directly to consumers.