CHILDREN as young as eight are being taken to hospital as a result of alcohol, a husband and wife team of paramedics revealed today.

The couple, who tour schools across East Lancashire, said they now wanted to start including alcohol awareness in their talks.

Jane Atkinson, an ambulance technician at Barnoldswick and her husband Paul, a paramedic based at Nelson said child casualties from drinking were a regular sight at weekends.

Jane said: "They congregate and parents have no idea where they are, they all get together in groups and they think they are grown up and some are as young as eight years old.

"Children need educating on what happens to them when they drink too much alcohol."

As the half term break begins she warned that ambulance services could be busier, adding: "Holidays are always a time when some children who can't go out on a school night will be out because they are on holiday."

The shocking state of our child drinkers was revealed earlier this month when the Lancashire Evening Telegraph highlighted the results of a Lancashire county council survey which showed 63 per cent of nine to 13-year-olds had experimented with alcohol.

We revealed that many children did not know how high the alcohol content of alcopops was.

The couple, who live in Burnley, have visited schools across East Lancashire over a period of seven years and recently won the Lancashire Ambulance Service Community Service Award for their efforts towards educating about their work.

Paul added: "This sort of thing does happen and some children die from it.

"We want to show the children real life situations to prevent them from experimenting, with potentially fatal outcomes."

The head at Hawthorn's Community Junior School, St James' Road, Blackburn, is one of the head teachers backing the scheme.

Gary Gornell said he would welcome the talks and added: "Anyone from outside agencies makes the children more interested.

"They see it is not just us hassling them but that things like alcohol affect the real world.

"It would be a great idea to have talks like this and would reinforce what we teach in schools already to help raise the age of drinkers."