With all that has been going on over the last 2 – 3 years, it is easy to forget that we were in an opioid crisis. This crisis hasn’t been fixed. It is still ongoing.
From NYT:
Opioids were the leading cause of fatal poisonings among children age 5 years old and younger in recent years, a study has found, underscoring how the opioid epidemic has not spared children.
The study, published on Wednesday in the journal Pediatrics, analyzed 731 poisoning-related deaths that occurred from 2005 to 2018 across 40 states. The authors found that opioids, a class of synthetic drugs that includes prescribed pain relievers but also illegal narcotics such as heroin and fentanyl, contributed to nearly half, or 47 percent, of those deaths.
About 41 percent of these poisoning deaths resulted from accidental overdoses, according to the study, which described 18 percent as “deliberate” poisonings.
And over the 14-year period from 2005 to 2018, the frequency of pediatric opioid poisonings steadily rose, accounting for more than half of child poisoning fatalities in 2018, the authors concluded.