By DEBORAH DAVIES

Last updated at 10:38 18 June 2007

This special investigation reveals the deadly epidemic of liver disease among middle-class social tipplers - and why the Government is cynically ignoring it.

Louise is young, yellow and dying. She shuffles along the ward in Derby City Hospital with a nurse at one arm keeping her steady.

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The raging jaundice that brought her into hospital ten days earlier is subsiding, leaving her skin the colour of a fading tan.

Louise is tiny but her stomach is terribly swollen with fluid, also a common symptom of alcoholic liver disease.

She's 28 and the doctors have warned her she'll be dead in two years if she doesn't stop drinking.

"Our youngest death was 22," says Dr Jan Freeman, the consultant on the ward. "Numbers are increasing and the average age is coming down dramatically. It used to be 60, now the average age is about 40."

Louise is an alcoholic, but many of Dr Freeman's patients are not.

He says an increasing number are young, middle-class professionals who have no idea of the damage they're doing to themselves through the kind of everyday, social drinking that most think is perfectly harmless.

"They think they're having a good time, not doing any harm, and one day wake up with conditions just like Louise."

A little over a week ago, the Government published its latest report on reducing alcohol misuse, called Safe, Sensible And Social.

Its 100 pages of good intentions, but a five-month investigation I took part in for the Channel 4 Dispatches programme suggests that ministers may have hugely underestimated the scale of the alcohol-related health crisis facing Britain and the monumental battle they'll have with the drinks industry to make any real changes to our drinking culture.

Liver disease is especially cruel because it builds up silently for many years. Catch it early and the liver has an extraordinary capacity to regenerate itself.

Leave it too long and your only options may be a liver transplant or an early death.

So the Dispatches team ran a unique experiment - offering free liver tests to the public to see just how widescale the problem actually is.

We set up a mobile clinic and parked it for one day in London and one day in Birmingham. The process was simple and straightforward.

First there was a blood test, using a special machine that can analyse just a finger-prick drop of blood and tell if the liver is in distress because of too much alcohol.

Then we ran tests using a new ultrasound machine called a Fibroscan, which is widely used in Europe. It detects changes in the liver tissue, which becomes stiffer and scarred if you drink too much.

The results were analysed by Dr Rajiv Jalan, a liver consultant from London's University College Hospital, who has been one of the first to evaluate the scanner here.

A reading above five on the machine is deemed abnormal and may indicate the first signs of early liver damage. Anything over ten could indicate serious problems.

One of the first people to be tested, a young executive in her 20s called Sharon, told Dr Jalan she drinks five or six Jack Daniel's on a Friday and Saturday nights and used to drink a lot more when she was younger. When we tested her liver, the reading was 7.1.

Next up was Peter, a City financier in his early 30s. His reading was 13.9. "I drink only the same as all my mates," he said, staring at the print-out of his results.

In London, the demand for free tests was almost overwhelming. Midway through the day, when we were already fully booked and turning people away, a very elegant woman arrived looking extremely anxious.

"Please, I know you're busy but I'd really like this test. I'll wait as I long as I have to." She was a 40-year-old highflying executive and was so agitated, that we fitted her in.

Her results were sky-high, suggesting she may already have irreversible liver disease. But she wasn't the only one heading for trouble.

By the end of the testing, we'd seen about 80 people and, astonishingly, just over half of them had abnormal results and several were worryingly high.

These were not the sort of people you might normally call "alcoholics". They did not drink whisky with their breakfast, or down a bottle of vodka alone each night.

Nor were they the mindless young bingers who pollute city centres each weekend, hell-bent on drinking themselves into oblivion just for the hell of it. They were social drinkers - "ordinary people".

People like Paul. Paul is 53, and he's just been put on the transplant waiting list - a race against time because he's unlikely to survive more than a couple of years without a new liver.

As a successful accountant, he sometimes entertained clients over lunch, but most of his drinking was done at home.

He and his wife enjoyed good wine. They both work hard and they always opened a bottle in the evenings - and finished it between them.

Paul knew he was probably drinking too much, he just didn't think it would ever be a problem.

"Very rarely did either of us get steaming drunk," says Sarah.

"Well, we didn't," adds Paul. "You just think it won't happen to you. You sleepwalk into this."

How many couples in Britain share Paul and Sarah's habit and open a bottle of wine most evenings? Judging by the number of people who gasp or pull faces whenever I mention it - rather a lot.

It's the biggest change in our drinking habits. As a nation, we drink less beer and spend less time in the pub. We're drinking more wine and consuming it at home.

Many people we spoke to know that the Government recommends women do not regularly drink more than two or three units of alcohol a day - three or four units for a man.

But ask them how much they get through in an evening at home and most either have no idea or wildly underestimate. That's because they assume one glass of wine roughly equals one unit.

A guilty check in my kitchen cupboard reveals how wrong that can be. While a small pub glass holds 125ml, it turned out that I don't own any wine glasses that, when full, hold less than 250ml.

So although they don't look particularly large, they each take a third of a bottle.

Today's New World reds, often stronger than Old World varieties, can easily contain 10.8 units in a bottle, so each 250ml glass is 3.6 units - already over the recommended daily allowance for a woman.

One glass! Regularly drinking two such glasses takes a woman into officially harmful levels, which risk significant health damage.

The other factor which came through really clearly from our testing was how the price of alcohol has changed the nation's drinking habits.

Quite simply, people can afford to drink more. Drink costs, in real terms, are half what they were in the 1970s.

And you can't miss all the special offers in the supermarkets, seemingly at end of the every aisle: two-for-one on wine, six bottles for £20, two boxes of Stella Artois lager for £20 (working out at 50p a bottle despite once being advertised as "Reassuringly expensive").

The alcohol industry and the retailers deny that they encourage people to drink more. They argue that people who buy six bottles of wine are simply spreading out their drinking and get through the same amount as if they bought one bottle at a time.

However, most people we spoke to laughed at that idea. "Not in our house!" was the standard reply. "If it's there, we drink it!"

The Government's Safe, Sensible And Social report promises what it calls an independent national review next year to examine whether low prices, special promotions and advertising are encouraging problem drinking.

Frankly, health ministers already know the answer because last year the European Commission published a major report which included an in-depth section on the proven link between cheap prices and increased consumption.

The Government must also know that the same report triggered a massive row with the drinks industry, which immediately tried to undermine the findings and succeeded in derailing its main recommendations.

The report was written by a British doctor, Peter Anderson, an expert on public health. He spent two years evaluating hundreds of scientific papers on how to stop people drinking too much.

He concluded: "The effective policies are those that make alcohol less easily available.

So you need to put the price up, don't make alcohol available all the time, everywhere, and you have to limit - if not ban completely - the advertising and marketing of alcohol."

Of course, that's the opposite of what's been happening in Britain, where booze is cheaper and more available than ever - not least because of the relaxation of pub hours brought in by New Labour.

Any restriction on the sale of alcohol is heresy to the alcohol industry, which claims it's unfair to penalise the responsible majority for the sins of the drunken minority.

Of course, it tends not to mention that anything that reduces how much we all drink will cut the industry's sales and profits.

One Eurocrat insider told us that the powers of the industry lobbying against the Anderson Report were "absolutely unprecedented".

The fight was led by the Brewers Of Europe organisation, which includes the British Beer And Pub Association (BBPA).

First they commissioned a rival report, written by a group of academics selected by the industry. It concluded there was no need to reduce the overall consumption of alcohol.

Not content with that, the industry also insisted that the European Commission brought in another group of experts to review its original report.

The BBPA spokesman Mark Hastings sent out an e-mail predicting that the review would find the first report was "fundamentally flawed and lacking in academic rigour or credibility".

However, the experts actually described the original report as accurate, important and impressive.

But the sheer pressure of lobbying has worked. The European Commission stopped talking about new laws to regulate the price, availability and marketing of alcohol and, instead, the focus is on a voluntary partnership with the industry, to educate people about how to drink sensibly.

So it will be very interesting to see how the British Government's proposed review of pricing and marketing works out next year.

Perhaps it will go the way of another recent announcement which the Health Minister, Caroline Flint, called a "landmark agreement" with the alcohol industry - to put labels on the backs of all cans and bottles, showing how many units of alcohol they contain, as well as the recommended daily limits and a health warning.

Dispatches has discovered that when the talks began 18 months ago, a whole series of tough health messages were discussed which would appear on all cans and bottles.

For instance, "Too much alcohol can raise your blood pressure"; "longterm heavy use of alcohol can cause heart failure" and "cirrhosis kills the under-30s".

Several of these were suggested by the British Liver Trust, which was delighted to be invited by the Health Ministry to join the consultation process.

But it was less delighted to discover the final decision was being taken by a committee consisting only of government and alcohol industry people.

Even worse, it found out that the only message being proposed was one directed at pregnant women and those trying to conceive.

The Trust's chief executive, Alison Rogers, calls it a "watered down and limited message which doesn't apply to the majority of people".

Exactly why the other, stronger health warnings aimed at a wider audience were rejected is unclear because the Government refused our Freedom of Information request for the committee's minutes.

But Jeremy Beadles of the Wine and Spirit Trade Association, a member of the committee, says the messages were too vague and too complicated to fit on the back of a bottle. Really?

Finally, we decided to organise one other liver testing clinic - in a room opposite the Houses of Parliament.

We invited about 200 MPs - mostly members of the All Party Beer Group, which supports the pub and brewing trade and is the most popular committee in Westminster - to have their livers tested.

Only three turned up. Could it be because the alcohol industry contributes £30 billion a year to the economy, which gives them enormous political clout?

To put it bluntly, health campaigners, including the medical profession have been out-resourced and out-lobbied.

Back at University College Hospital, I caught up with our programme consultant, Dr Rajiv Jalan, as he was finishing a surgical procedure to prevent what's called a "variceal bleed" on a 38-year-old man who was in serious trouble from liver damage which had caused the blood vessels in his throat to swell and burst.

Dr Jalan explained that the results of our tests had exceeded his worst fears. "Liver disease in 20 and 30-year-olds is rife and if we don't do anything about it we are looking at an epidemic that the Health Service will find impossible to deal with."

Hospital admissions for alcoholic liver disease have doubled in the past ten years and the results of our investigation suggest it is only going to get worse. Still fancy a drink tonight?