Buckfast, a tonic wine made by monks has been at the heart of the controversy surrounding Scotland’s problems with drink and crime, and which campaigners in USA highlighted as the worst product.

Buckfast tonic wine, BBC reveals following a freedom of information request linked to a 18th January programme about it, has been mentioned in 5,638 Strathclyde Police crime reports during the 2006 – 2009 period.

In the past 15-years, chronic liver disease associated with binge-drinking has trebled in Scotland, the second-highest rate in Europe.

According to newly released NHS 2008 statistics, 9,072 people with the condition received hospital treatment, with 1,059 deaths caused by the disease.

Further, the mortality rate among 30 to 39-year-olds due to chronic liver disease has risen five-fold in 25 years, coming at a time many other European countries are experiencing falling rates, with only EU’s poorest country Hungary having higher rates than Scotland.

In a deliberate concealing of details, it was only after four days after a fatal infection claimed the lives of five patients that a Scottish health authority reported the outbreak.

Dundee’s Ninewells Hospital in its internal report into the deaths also disclosed, patients were not informed they had contracted a fatal and virulent 027 strain of Clostridium difficile, though they knew they had the bug.

According to new statistics, over the last decade over 7,000 children in Scotland have been admitted to hospital for deliberately harming themselves, as well as, a further 160,000 people aged over
16 hospitalised for the same between 1998 and 2009.

Typically beginning around age 14 and peaking between the ages of 16 and 25-years, self-harm ranges from scratching to cutting the skin to poisoning. Each year, around 150,000 people are treated in casualty departments due to self-harming, which makes it one of the top five causes of acute medical admission in the UK.

According to Harriet Dempster, President of the Association of Directors of Social Work, Scotland may not be able to afford the free personal care offered to the elderly, for long, with Scottish authorities being forced to scrap free universal health care for the elderly due to spiralling costs.

A cross-party group of AMs are urging the Assembly Government to ban the use of unsupervised coin-operated sunbeds in tanning salons, including banning under-18s from using sun beds and insisting all operators of such salons to obtain consent in writing from customers, before permitting them to use the machines.

While, survival rates of lung cancer in men have improved significantly, new figures show the numbers for Scottish women dying of lung cancer are soaring, bucking the trend for other cancer death rates decreasing north of the Border.

In the 10-years to 2008, men's lung cancer deaths have fallen sharply by 21%, even while they have risen by over 11% for women.

Even though, lung, bowel, breast and oesophagus cancers remain the big killers, overall cancer death rates for men have gone down 12% over the past decade.

The launch of Suicide Prevention Week in Scotland, is a stark reminder that two people take their own lives everyday.

In 2008, there were 843-suicides in Scotland, more than those killed in road traffic accidents.