LADIES, do you daydream about being a Cool Wine Aunt one day?

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Alcohol is killing more people, and younger. The biggest increases are among women

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One alarming statistic: Deaths among women rose 85 percent. Women once drank far less than men, and their more moderate drinking helped prevent heart disease, offsetting some of the harm.

Deaths among men rose 29 percent.

While teen deaths from drinking were down about 16 percent during the same period, deaths among people aged 45 to 64 rose by about a quarter.

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Ron Byrd says Erika, too, dreamed of having children. After two divorces and stage 3b breast cancer, however, the chance was slipping away.

"She wanted so desperately to have a baby," Byrd says.

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The last time lawyer Erika Byrd talked her way out of an alcohol rehab center, her father took her to lunch.

"Dad, I know what alcohol has done to me," she told him that day in January 2011. "I know what it has made me do to you and mom. But that wasn’t me."

By the time she died three months later, Byrd had blocked her parents' calls because they kept having her involuntarily committed. They once had a magistrate judge hold a hearing at her hospital bed. He ordered herto undergo a month of in-patient treatment.

Byrd, who died in April 2011 at the age of 42, is among the rising number of people in the United States who have been killed by alcohol in the last decade.

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