Let me put cards on the table. My wineglass, too. It's still not quite respectable for a woman to say this, but I do like a drink. Usually I have my first glass of the evening while I'm listening to the news. This turned out to be not such a good idea the other night, when Radio 4 broke into my happy hour to announce that a large new study had found that 'a woman is 6 per cent more likely to develop breast cancer with every drink she drinks'.

What? There had to be a mistake. If there wasn't, I'd be 12 per cent more likely to develop cancer by suppertime, and the risk I had accumulated since my first ever drink was, let's see - a million per cent? I leaned forward, hoping for clarifying detail. But there was none.

The papers the next day were slightly more helpful. The famous 6 per cent referred not to every drink but to a drink a day over a lifetime. As for risks, it was swings and obscure roundabouts. Mostly we were advised not to worry our little heads too much, as moderate drinking reduced the risk of heart disease. Only in the Guardian did we get a meaningful breakdown of the risk factor.

It turned out to depend on how old you were. The risk of breast cancer up to the age of 30 is one in 1,900. Up to the age of 40, it is one in 200, or 0.5 per cent. A 41-year-old woman will increase that risk to 0.53 per cent if she has one drink a night. So what was all the fuss about? Sarah Boseley wanted to know. If we were worried about women and alcohol, we'd do better to look at more important issues, like, for example, the rise in the number of young women drinking as heavily as their male colleagues, 'even though their constitution is ill set-up to deal it'.

But as it happened, no one took her up on it. By the next day, the story was over. To me, that was the most disturbing thing - that it came and went without the medical establishment getting out the basic facts. Or did they try to join in the debate and did their attempts fall on deaf ears? This has to be a possibility, because the facts are grim. And horribly, horribly unfair.

If I match a man drink for drink, I'll suffer serious consequences far sooner than he will. If I'm having just four units of alcohol a day, I run an increased risk of cancer, coronary heart disease, strokes, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, digestive problems, loss of cognitive function and birth defects. If I drink enough to qualify as an 'alcohol-dependent', I'll suffer liver, heart, muscle and brain damage sooner than a man.

If I stop drinking, it will take longer for my tissue to repair itself. And if I don't? According to US figures, I am five times more likely to commit suicide than a teetotal woman and twice as likely to die as a man drinking the same amount.

The Department of Health sets the safe drinking level at 14 units a week for women and 21 units a week for men. Most women (roughly four in five) claim to stay below the limit. Self-reporting is notoriously inaccurate. There are too many good reasons to lie. But between 1988 and 1998, the number of women admitting to drinking over the limit increased by 50 per cent. In 1998, one in five women reported drinking more than 14 units a week and one in 10 reported drinking 15 and 25 units. Half a million women said they were drinking at 'very risky' levels. Doctors will say off the record that they routinely double any estimate made by a patient.

Although there are different drinking patterns in different ethnic groups and regions, young women generally drink more than older women, full-time working women more than women who are 'economically inactive' and women in male-dominated workplaces, where hard drinking is 'part of the culture', are more likely to drink to excess.

That's their choice, you might say. But most of them are making that choice without knowing, for example, that they have less fluid in their bodies to dilute the alcohol and less tissue to absorb it. Because they have lower levels of alcohol dehydrogenase (AHD) in their stomachs, alcohol will stay in their stomachs longer before being metabolised and so will have a greater effect. There are studies suggesting that oral contraceptives slow it down even more.

So why are more women going down the slippery slope? Studies suggest there are four triggers: family pressures, pressures at work, partnerships and social scene. Many women drink to overcome sexual problems. Others start drinking excessively because they have a partner who drinks heavily. For every hard-drinking executive, there's a housewife and mother drinking to cope with isolation.

One in every 25 people in this country is dependent on alcohol. About 20 per cent of men will have an alcohol problem at some point in their lives. Women account for only a quarter of the official figures. But the real figure could be higher due to widespread misdiagnosis. Devon Jersild, author of an excellent book called Happy Hours: Alcohol in a Woman's Life (published in the US last year), believes this is because 'the dominant images of alcoholism and recovery are based on male experience'. A woman is more likely to drink secretly - and with good reason. According to Marian Sandmaier, author of The Invisible Alcoholics: Women and Alcohol, a female drunk is seen as a danger not just to herself but to her family and society:

'Wherever drinking among women has been limited in history, it has been linked with promiscuity and neglect of home and hearth; it has always sparked a terrifying vision of what she might say, do or be, once freed by alcohol.'

This is certainly the story we get in our own tabloids. The endless stories about 'ladette culture' and 'feckless pregnant women' feed right into larger moral panics about eroding family values and the 'end of femininity'. They attract attention for what they symbolise. The women themselves count for little. As for helping them - who cares? The worst thing about the shaming and naming is that it creates a culture of blame in which women are more reluctant to admit to a drinking problem, more likely to put off seeking help and more likely to be punished for having done so.

This is not to say there aren't people out there, struggling to get them the help and information they deserve. But they are severely hampered by a press that is forever seizing upon their findings and twisting them to make a moral point, and a medical establishment that is so worried about 'creating a panic' that it is reluctant to challenge them head on. This endangers us all and for what? Just as drivers need to be aware of the dangers of speeding before doing 80 in the fast lane, women need to know the facts about alcohol before they start drinking, not after.

The point is not to stop taking women taking any risks at all, but to give them the wherewithal to calculate their risks intelligently, so that they can adjust them to changing circumstances over time, with room for trial and error along the way.

And to do that, they need more than the facts. They also need context, a commodity that the culture of shame makes sure to keep in short supply. We hide our relatives when they go off the deep end. We hide them best when they're women. We only talk about them when we're very sure that the person we are speaking to has 'that problem' in their family, too.

How strange that is, when you think how widespread 'that problem' is. Alcohol Concern recently called for a coherent national strategy to get the facts out and challenge the stigma. It also called for more and better prevention and screening programmes, and women-focused services. So far, nothing has happened. How much longer do we have to wait?

· Call Drinkline on 0800 917 8282.

· Mary Riddell is away this week.