U.S. Health Chief Says Overdose Deaths Are Starting to ‘Plateau’ But ‘We Are So Far From the End’

(WASHINGTON) — The number of U.S. drug overdose deaths has begun to level off after years of relentless increases driven by the opioid epidemic, health secretary Alex Azar said Tuesday, cautioning it’s too soon to declare victory. “We are so far from the end of the epidemic, but we are perhaps, at the end of the beginning,” Azar said in prepared remarks for a health care event sponsored by the Milken Institute think tank. Confronting the opioid epidemic has been the rare issue uniting Republicans and Democrats in a politically divided nation. A bill providing major funding for treatment was passed under former President Barack Obama, and two more have followed under President Donald Trump. More than 70,000 people died of drug overdoses last year, according to preliminary numbers released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this summer— a 10 percent increase from 2016. Azar said in his speech that toward the end of last year and through the beginning of this year, the number of deaths “has begun to plateau.” Azar was not suggesting that deaths are going down, but noting that they appear to be rising at a slower rate than previously seen. Earlier this month, the CDC released figures — also preliminary — that appear to show a slowdown in overdose deaths in late 2017 and the first three months of this year. From December to March, those figures show that the pace of the increase over the previous 12 months has s...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Addiction health onetime U.S. Source Type: news