United States: Overdose death estimates in the U. S. has been trending downward for months and the latest numbers show that it is at its lowest mark in 3 years according to CDC data.
As reported by ABC news, death due to overdose was reported a decline in 2023 for the first time in half a decade, continuing the pre-vaccine pandemic trend. However, there are currently more overdose deaths the population than before the pandemic began.
CDC report says that for the purpose of number of death predictions the estimated number of deaths in the preceding 12 months calculated as per April 2024 was 101,168. Figures were that low in May 2021, with 100,997 deaths, the last month.
Other data, including emergency department visits and calls to EMS, also point to the declining trend, while Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta, a senior scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Injury Prevention Research Centre led the analysis. When speaking to ABC News, he says that the data could be indicative of up to 20,000 less deaths per year, or more.
Despite more research being conducted to identify potential causes for this decline there are several public health interventions aimed at preventing drug overdoses which are possibly beginning to bear some progress.
“Better availability of naloxone, a greater number of persons receiving treatment for opioid use disorder, and improved awareness of the risks associated with synthetic opioids such as fentanyl are most probably, contributing to saving people’s lives,” Brownstein said.
Another potential reason for the decline, Dasgupta says, could also be supply factors, including an increase in the number of people using xylazine, a hazardous, non-opioid sedative of animals that is combined with other opioids including fentanyl.
Xylazine makes people use less fentanyl is the bottom line and Dasgupta told the ABC News while citing research that showed that those who. Overdosed and tested positive for the xylazine in their particular system and this could be due to the facet that those who used the illicit substances like fentanyl which is mixed with the xylazine may be using those substances less often and that’s what the Dasgupta said.
Also we are seeing this a kind of pattern kind of happening that looks a lot like a change in the drug supply more so than just to explained by all the interventions in the public health space added by Dasgupta and it’s probably a mix of all of these things at the end of the day but something really changed in the quarter of the last year.