Doctors have warned the Government that Britain faces an epidemic of liver disease caused by binge drinking and cheap booze.

New figures show that the North East has been hit particularly hard, with figures showing a 400 per cent increase in hospital admissions for people in their early 30s with alcoholic liver disease.

Consultants are now supporting a campaign by Balance, the northeast of England’s alcohol office, to curb advertising by the alcohol industry in a bid to prevent teenagers becoming the next generation of problem drinkers.

In the open letter, published in The Guardian, the consultants – who are mostly liver specialists and gastroenterologists – blamed the problem on our having created “an excessively pro-alcohol culture by selling alcohol for pocket money prices.”

They said that a decade ago it was unusual for a liver specialist to treat anyone under the age of 50 for alcoholic cirrhosis.

“Alarmingly, this is no longer the case,” they say. “In the North East we are in the middle of an epidemic.

AOL