We're all doomed.

From The Evening Standard (much better value etc.):

A girl aged six was admitted to hospital after drinking dangerous levels of alcohol... She was one of 198 under-17s who received treatment at hospitals in East Sussex for drink or drug abuse over a five-year period.

*ahem*

Population of East Sussex 512,000

Let's guess one-fifth are under-17s, call it 100,000.

198 under-17s "received treatment" in five years = 40 a year

40 divided by 100,000 = 0.04% (or on in 2,500).

The article does not tell us the split between "drink abuse" and "drug abuse" (sic), let's call it half-and-half.

*/ahem*

Therefore, we could summarise the article thusly: "Only one-in-five thousand under-17s in East Sussex require medical attention because of over-consumption of alcohol every year."

The fact that any newspaper peddles this as a horror story, rather than a testament to how sensibly people in East Sussex deal with alcohol, is most troubling.