The menace of drunken young people is overwhelming the hard-pressed National Health Service here in the UK. According to Dr. Nick Edwards, drunken youth are causing chaos Saturday nights in hospital Accident and Emergency (A&E) rooms as a result of an endless progression of alcohol-fueled injuries and violence.

Writing of such a night, Dr. Edwards observed (Mail Online, January 28):

Only 8:30 p.m., but already my scrubs are flecked with vomit and blood.The shift started an hour and a half ago and so far I’ve had to deal with not one but three teenage girls paralytic with alcohol.As is the custom these days, they’d “pre-loaded.” That’s the technical term for drinking huge amounts of beer, wine and alcopops before leaving home. It’s to avoid spending money on expensive drinks in a club.But these girls had so much to drink they didn’t actually make it to a club—they collapsed in the street outside.

Edwards added that scenes such as he described are tragically all too familiar to A&E doctors working across the land. The three teenagers were just the start of a typical Saturday night “drunken onslaught” of injured drunk patients causing chaos in British hospitals.

A recent study by Imperial College, published in the Guardian, showed that patients admitted to hospitals at the weekend have a 7 percent higher chance of dying than if admitted during the week.

Is this because many genuine patients are being denied treatment because doctors’ time is being diverted to treat alcoholics on weekends? The study, published in a newspaper of liberal disposition, didn’t posit that conclusion, but a recent case shows that it indeed may well be the case.

The Mail Online tells of one mother who died “because A&E was clogged up with drunks.” Her grieving husband said they waited for five hours while drunk patients who arrived by ambulance were placed above them in the queue. After a 30-minute consultation, doctors sent them home. When her condition worsened later that day, they returned to the hospital only to wait another two hours before doctors saw her again. After a battery of tests they diagnosed her with lung failure; she died five hours later.

Dr. Edwards describes what happens as a matter of course on a typical Saturday night shift at his hospital (op. cit.):

When an ambulance arrives at A&E—or when a noisy, bloodied drunk turns up—it is human instinct to respond to the shouts and noise. …Of course the triage nurse—the A&E gatekeeper who assesses the damage and need for attention—will do their professional best to ensure that it’s the medical priorities who get the attention. But chances are the wild and noisy drunk will be seen sooner than the quietly suffering type.

Britain’s growing culture of heavy drinking is placing an “unsustainable burden” on the health-care system and is costing the National Health Service more than £2.7 billion a year, according to a 2010 report by the Royal College of Physicians. Official figures show alcohol-related hospital admissions in England have risen by at least 33 percent in the last three years.

Alcoholism taking on disease proportions in Britain is but a sign of the accelerating societal descent of the once great British nation.

There’s a Bible prophecy for the times that describes this sad phenomenon of today’s Britain, a nation once so proud of its royal heritage: “Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, whose glorious beauty is a fading flower, which are on the head of the fat valleys of them that are overcome with wine!” (Isaiah 28:1).

To understand the biblical identity of Britain, why its former greatness and why its rapid fall from power, read our book The United States and Britain in Prophecy.

To more thoroughly understand the current acceleration of Britain’s moral decline, study our booklet Hosea—Reaping the Whirlwind.

For the hope that lies beyond Britain and America’s current woes, read The Incredible Human Potential.

With editorial assistance by Ron Fraser.