A SURVIVOR has been found at the site where a Yemeni Airbus A310 crashed into the Indian Ocean off the Comoros, a Yemenia airline official said.

The wreckage of the jet, carrying 153 people, was spotted about an hour before the discovery.

“A small plane flew over the scene and the pilot spotted debris and the craft,” the Government’s secretary-general, Nourdine Bourhane, said at about 6pm (AEST).

Yemen’s civil aviation authorities said some bodies had also been spotted at the site of the plane crash.

“Bodies were seen floating on the surface of the water and a fuel slick was also spotted about 16 or 17 nautical miles from Moroni,” senior civil aviation official Mohammad Abdel Kader said.

The Airbus, belonging to Yemen’s national carrier Yemenia was carrying 66 French nationals, and Comorans.

Abdel Kader said three of the passengers were newborn babies, while the 11-member crew was made up of various nationalities. The crash occurred less than a month after an Air France Airbus carrying 228 passengers plunged into the Atlantic while en route from Brazil to France.

No Australians are thought to have been on board the flight, a spokeswoman for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said.

“The Australian embassies in Port Louis, Riyadh and Paris are urgently seeking to confirm the reports and determine whether any Australians are on board,” she said.

“We have not had any suggestions that any Australians were involved.”

A Comoran airport official told AFP the plane went down in stormy weather conditions.

“The flight was expected at 2230 GMT (0830 AEST, Tuesday). Before landing the control tower lost communication with the crew,” said Hadji Mmadi Ali, the director of Moroni international airport.

“The weather conditions were unfavourable with strong winds.”

The plane was was due to have touched down in Moroni at 2300 GMT on Monday (0900 AEST, today).

The flight started at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport yesterday when an Airbus A330-200 aircraft took off for Marseille in southern France and then on to Sanaa, the capital of Yemen.

In Sanaa, passengers changed to an Airbus A310 and departed for Moroni via Djibouti.

A crisis taskforce has been set up at Charles de Gaulle airport.

Yemenia was set up in 1978 and is 51 per cent owned by the Yemeni Government and 49 per cent by the government in neighbouring Saudi Arabia.

Russians have gone on an Vodka alcohol binge remarkable even by their own formidable standards, according to the country’s chief public health officer.

The average Russian consumes almost three times as much alcohol as he did 16 years ago. A report by Gennadi Onishenko, head of the consumer protection agency, found that Russians drink 15 litres (26 pints) of pure alcohol per year, or half a pint a week, compared with 5.4 litres in 1990. That far exceeds the estimate of 9.7 litres made in 2005. The study calculated that at least 2.3 million people in Russia were alcoholics, and blamed rising mortality rates, particularly among men, on drink.

The terrible cost of Russia’s love affair with vodka was laid bare in a study published yesterday. It blamed alcohol addiction for more than half of all deaths among Russians in their prime years and said that the scale of the carnage was comparable to a war.

The report, which appeared in The Lancet, said that three quarters of deaths among men and half of deaths among women aged 15-54 were attributable to alcohol abuse. The mortality rate in Russia in this age group was five times higher for men and three times higher for women than in Western Europe.

Professor David Zaridze, who led the international research team, calculated that alcohol had killed three million Russians since Mikhail Gorbachev tried and failed to restrict sales in 1987. He added: “This loss is similar to that of a war.”

The study analysed the deaths of almost 49,000 people between 1990 and 2001 in Tomsk, Barnaul and Biysk, three industrial cities in Siberia with typical mortality rates. It concluded that alcohol was the cause of 52 per cent of mortalities; 13 times greater than the worldwide average.

The Russian, British and French researchers said that “excess mortality from liver cancer, throat cancer, liver disease and pancreatic disease is largely or wholly because alcohol caused the disease that caused death”.

The findings will fuel the debate about a slump in life expectancy in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, particularly among men. The average Russian man now lives little more than 60 years, compared with 77 years for men in Western Europe, while Russian women die on average at 73, nine years earlier than their European counterparts.

Soaring poverty and stress associated with the Soviet collapse, and the loss of jobs and security, have been blamed. The study highlighted a doubling of alcohol consumption in seven years between 1987 and 1994 to about 10.5 litres annually per person.

“Alcohol consumption is always connected with poverty. It’s been associated with social crisis. If we take our mortality statistics, it will be obvious that it’s parallel to our social crisis,” said Professor Zaridze, head of the Russian Cancer Research Centre.

Consumption has continued to rise sharply. A report in 2007 by Gennadi Onishchenko, the Chief Public Health Officer, said that Russians were drinking the equivalent of 15 litres of pure alcohol each year. His report said that almost 30,000 people died annually from alcohol poisioning and that at least 2.3 million people were alcoholics.

Attempts to limit Russians’ thirst have never enjoyed much success. Mr Gorbachev almost lost public support for his reforms by launching an antialcohol campaign in 1985, whichmerely encouraged a black market and put a hole in the state budget from lost revenues on official sales.

As President, Vladimir Putin ordered the introduction of a strict licensing system to fight illicit alcohol sales. It provoked complaints that poorer Russians were risking death by turning to industrial cleaners.

Even so, vodka remains remarkably cheap by European standards and supermarket shelves are lined with brands costing as little as £2 per bottle. Beer sales have tripled since 1998, but most do not regard beer as a “serious” alcoholic drink and it is common to see people consuming a bottle on their way to work in the mornings.

While Russians’ love for vodka is undiminished, beer consumption has risen sharply, encouraged by advertisements portraying it as fashionable, the study notes. The popularity of beer among the young created further potential for “mass alcoholism”.Sales of beer and other lower alcohol drinks have tripled since 1998 and accounted for 75 per cent of the 12 billion litres of alcohol sold in Russia last year. Vodka represented 16 per cent of sales by volume, double the level for wines.

Deaths caused directly by alcohol poisoning fell but alcohol-related illnesses continued to account for one in eight of all deaths in Russia.

Alcohol dependence is seen as central to the country’s demographic crisis; the population is declining by 700,000 a year and male life expectancy has fallen to less than 59 years, compared with 72 for women. Russia also suffers significant economic damage because of alcohol abuse among workers.

Mr Onishenko called for a campaign to reduce alcoholism and to improve education. His appeal is likely to fall on deaf ears. Soviet leaders, notably Mikhail Gorbachev, tried without success to curb Russians’ thirst for alcohol.

The Government’s strict licensing system, introduced under pressure from President Putin, prompted concern that poorer people were risking their lives by drinking cleaning fluids as vodka prices rose to pay for the new licences.

Experts have identified the body of Marc Dubois, the captain of Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic on June 1 in a disaster that has raised doubts about the safety of the world’s modern airliners.

The remains of Mr Dubois, 58, and those of one of the stewards, were among a dozen bodies identified from 50 that were found in the Atlantic off Brazil and taken to the coastal city of Recife.

All 228 people on board the A330 Airbus died when it broke up while crossing a storm zone on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

Brazil has called off the hunt for bodies and wreckage from an Air France jet that plunged into the Atlantic earlier this month with 228 people aboard. But the search for the “black boxes” that might explain what happened will continue.

Investigators are to present their first report into the disaster on Thursday but this is likely to be inconclusive without input from the flight recorders.

The recorders are designed to emit an audio signal for up to a month. That expires on Wednesday. However, investigators have said that the search by a nuclear submarine will continue into July in the hope that the beep will still be heard 12,000ft down.

Officials have identified 11 of the 50 bodies recovered from an Air France jet that plunged into the Atlantic three weeks ago, by using fingerprints and dental records.

The bodies were identified as “10 Brazilians and one foreigner,” officials in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco said yesterday.

Five of the Brazilians were male, the other five were female and the foreigner was male. The officials, part of a task force that also includes Brazilian police and forensic specialists conducting autoposies in the city of Recife, did not give further details about those identified.

They said the families of the identified Brazilians had been visited personally Friday and Saturday by police officers who broke the news. The embassy of the foreigner who was identified was also notified.

Some 600 pieces of debris from the Rio-to-Paris flight have also been recovered.

Suspicions have grown that faulty air speed indicators are to blame for the crash, prompting a separate investigation in America last week into two recent Airbus emergencies involving misleading readings. Both aircraft landed safely.

It has emerged that because of messages sent automatically from flight AF447 in the seconds before it crashed in a storm off northeastern Brazil on June 1, engineers were dispatched to the airport in Paris to meet the plane and replace its air speed sensors, known as “pitot tubes”.

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