[ad_1]
The fentanyl synthetic opioid has boosted the rate of fatal drug overdose in all racial and social layers in the United States, with the largest increase among African Americans, according to a new analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Prevention.
The fentanyl drug overdose rate increased by an average of 141% each year from 2011 to 2016, with a particularly dramatic increase from 2014. The death rate for Hispanics increased by 118% in average period each year and 61% for non-Hispanic whites. The CDC did not have reliable data on Americans of Asian and Amerindian origin.
Overdoses related to fentanyl – which is often mixed with heroin, cocaine and other drugs – remain more common among non-Hispanic whites, about 7.7 deaths per 100,000 annually, compared to a mortality rate of 5.6 for blacks and 2.5 for Hispanics. Lead author of the report, Merianne Rose Spencer, a health statistician for the CDC's Center for Health Statistics, pointed out that changing mortality rates was the most significant revelation.
The report recalls that deadly opioids are increasingly costing urban drug users. Fentanyl is a factor in the recent increase in mortality rates among American demographic groups and the decline in life expectancy.
"We are seeing it in all areas," said Robert Anderson, head of the CDC's mortality statistics branch.
The report shows that men and women had about the same fentanyl mortality rate in the first three years of the study. Both sexes increased over the next three years, from 2014 to 2016, but the mortality rate for men was 8.6 per 100,000, compared to 3.1 for women.
The opioid epidemic is linked to over-prescription of powerful painkillers, such as oxycodone, and an under-appreciation of their addictive potential. At the beginning of this decade, after the crackdown on illicit clinics known as pill factories, many people addicted to prescription drugs switched to heroin and overdoses rose in many communities. Then synthetic fentanyl, 50 times more potent than heroin, invaded the country from Mexico and China, often delivered by US mail. A Washington Post investigation released last week revealed that the government was slow to recognize the catastrophic potential of newly arrived fentanyl and ignored calls for declaring a national emergency.
Fentanyl "has begun to take revenge," said Senator Rob Portman, R-Ohio, during an interview last week. "We were making progress, we were starting to move in that direction, and the fentanyl simply overwhelmed the systems."
The report released Thursday morning marks the first time that the CDC has succeeded in isolating the role of fentanyl in the drug epidemic, which kills about 70,000 Americans a year. A separate report released this month by the CDC, tracking monthly changes in the number of overdose deaths from all drugs, shows that the death rate has stabilized over the past year and a half.
This suggests that the epidemic has reached a plateau. The peak appears to have been in November 2017, with about 72,287 deaths. The latest interim figures from the CDC, from August 2018, report 70,424 deaths.
"We would look at that and say it's pretty flat," said CDC's Anderson. "We would be reluctant to call it a real decline."
"It's a very significant story that for the first time in eight years, we do not see an increase in the number of overdose deaths," Portman said. "We think it is still too high, but we are cautiously optimistic and believe that we have finally reached the milestone after eight years."
Since 1999, the number of fatal overdoses in the United States has quadrupled. Synthetic opioids such as fentanyl killed nearly 29,000 people in 2017, according to the CDC; the 2018 numbers have not been published yet.
The new report shows that there is an epidemic primarily to the east of the Mississippi River and particularly acute in New England, where street heroin has always been, like fentanyl, sold in powder form, so that the two drugs mix easily. In the western United States, heroin has generally been sold in the form of black tar and does not mix so easily with fentanyl – although this may change due to innovations in the illicit drug trade.
[ad_2]
Source link