Acadia student involved in binge drinking dies
Posted Sep 8, 2011 02:49:25 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
RCMP confirm the 19 year-old Acadia student who was taken to hospital Tuesday with alcohol poisoning has died. The young man from Alberta was found unresponsive in a dorm room at the school in Wolfville, NS early that morning.
RCMP Sgt. Brigdit Leger says he was taken to hospital in Halifax where he died.
“The victim was kept on life support until his organs were harvested for transplant purposes,” she says.
The victim allegedly drank an entire 40 ounce bottle of straight alcohol. Police, however are not saying if the alcohol was the ultimate cause of his death. An autopsy is scheduled for Friday.
No names are being released at the request of the family.
This as the provincial Minister of Health says Nova Scotia has a drinking problem. Maureen Macdonald says she’s well aware of it.
“It is true, I hear from trauma physicians and ER doctors about the numbers of people they see in the emergency rooms as a result of both alcohol and drug abuse,” she says.
Macdonald is promising to pursue more public education on the effects and consequences of binge drinking.
“We do have a problem. If our ER docs are telling us too many of the patients they see are people who are suffering from alcohol related traumas, then that is something that concerns me,” she says.
Meantime, the province’s Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Robert Strang has raised concern over cheap booze that is readily available and accessible and what he calls, misleading advertising of alcoholic products.
