Put health warning on gambling adverts, says leading paediatrician

A strongly worded editorial in the Malta Medical Journal has suggested an official caveat on all betting advertising, stating that “gambling can seriously damage your health”.

Leading paediatrician Simon Attard Montalto suggested that similar ‘smoking warning’ notices for gambling should accompany all betting advertising.

Gambling is known to become addictive, with “pathological gamblers’ making up around 1.5% of any western population, increasing to 5.4% if ‘problem’ and ‘pathological’ gamblers are combined. ‘Problem’ gambling has been estimated to cost the taxpayer in the UK around £1.2 billion per annum, mostly for additional NHS services.

Moreover gamblers are known to work up their way the ladder from worked their way up the ladder from recreational gambling to pathological gaming.

Attard Montalto denounced the sheer arrogance of intrusive betting advertising, often clothed “in nauseatingly bombastic narrative” and often included in promotional interruptions during key sporting events, as was the case in Malta in a  “full-screen advert lasting almost a minute during the most recent World Cup Final.”

He referred to the report in Global Gambling Statistics which noted that Malta boasts a small population but one of the “largest per-capita losses anywhere in the world.”

Attard Montalto said the “hype and glamour surrounding mega-wins is all spin” which adds “gloss to the more down-to-earth (and sordid) reality: namely, that the overwhelmingly vast majority of punters lose their money”.

He compared the situation for gaming to that of smoking and alcohol – all of which have a dire impact on individuals, families and society noting that governments ‘balance’ this tolerance by gambling-derived income and taxation. But any tax ‘hit’ is easily absorbed with little impact on the industry itself and often, “rather hypocritically, offset by exemptions and offshore tax-friendly sweeteners”.

He notes that the gambling community has been quick to migrate gambling in diverse forms and guises on-line. But at the same time high-street betting/gambling outlets have mushroomed, in line with on-line betting websites.

COVID restrictions have also contributed toward increasing the growth of the industry’s global earning by an estimated 5.6%.

While acknowledging that the “odd flutter may amount to a harmless folly”, he said habitual and compulsive betting had dire repercussions on health, finances and secondary problems to fund increasing debt with, in some cases, recourse to criminal activity.