logo
Overdose deaths fell by 30,000 last year — declining in every state except two

Overdose deaths fell by 30,000 last year — declining in every state except two

Yahoo15-05-2025

Overdose deaths in the U.S. plummeted by nearly 30,000 year-on-year - the largest decline ever recorded.
An estimated 80,391 people died from drugs in 2024, according to provisional Centers for Disease Control and prevention data. That marks a decrease of 27 percent from the 110,000 deaths reported in 2023.
'I would characterize this as a historically significant decrease in overdose deaths,' Brandon Marshall, a Brown University School of Public Health epidemiologist, told The Washington Post. 'We're really seeing decreases almost across the entire nation at this point.'
Deaths fell in all states but two: Nevada and South Dakota. They declined in all major categories of drug use, including stimulants and opioids.
The health agency credited President Donald Trump's actions during his first term, saying that Congressional support since 2017 has enabled it to expand critical data systems and strengthen overdose prevention capacity across all states.
Notably, the overdose-reversing drug naloxone has become more widely available.
'These investments have empowered us to rapidly collect, analyze, and share actionable data — enabling communities to better understand the specific drivers of overdose in their area and tailor prevention strategies to meet their unique local needs,' the agency added. 'Since late 2023, overdose deaths have steadily declined each month — a strong sign that public health interventions are making a difference and having a meaningful impact.'
However, overdose remains the leading cause of death for American adults between the ages of 18 to 44, the CDC noted, 'underscoring the need for ongoing efforts to maintain this progress.'
Annual overdose deaths are still higher than they were before the Covid pandemic, and a recent study revealed that a quarter of children in the U.S. have at least one parent with a substance use disorder.
The announcement also comes following major cuts to federal funding and research at the hand of the Trump administration, sparking concern among researchers.
'I don't see how it can be sustained, with the kinds of deep cuts that they're taking to many of the programs that have been driving these reductions,' Traci C. Green, an epidemiologist at Brandeis University, told The New York Times.
'Now is not the time to take the foot off the gas pedal,' Dr. Daniel Ciccarone, a drug policy expert at the University of California, San Francisco, said.
With reporting by The Associated Press

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

FDA Approves New 3-in-1 Combo Pill for High Blood Pressure
FDA Approves New 3-in-1 Combo Pill for High Blood Pressure

WebMD

timean hour ago

  • WebMD

FDA Approves New 3-in-1 Combo Pill for High Blood Pressure

June 11, 2025 – The FDA has approved a new pill for adults with high blood pressure (hypertension) that combines three medicines in one. Available in one regular and two lower doses, it offers a convenient option for treating hypertension, which affects nearly half of the adults in the U.S. and raises their risk of stroke and heart failure. Sold as Widaplik, it is the first and only single pill to combine three previously FDA-approved drugs – telmisartan, amlodipine, and indapamide – offering a triple-action approach for people who would otherwise need multiple pills to manage their blood pressure. It works in three ways and is a safe, well-tolerated early treatment option. Hypertension happens when your blood pushes too hard against your blood vessels, making the heart work harder and increasing the risk of heart problems, strokes, and other complications. It contributes to about 460,000 deaths annually in the U.S. and often goes undetected due to a lack of symptoms. With 1 in 3 Americans unaware they have it and only 1 in 4 managing it well, there's an urgent need for simpler, more effective treatments. The approval was based on two large studies that showed using Widaplik helped lower blood pressure more than using just two medicines or a placebo, according to a news release from the company that makes it, George Medicines. People who took Widaplik didn't stop taking it more often because of side effects, which means it was generally easy for them to take. Another trial showed that Widaplik was better at reducing blood pressure compared to standard care, while remaining well-tolerated. George Medicines stated that a global trial is underway to find out if the combo treatment can help prevent strokes in people who have previously had an intracerebral hemorrhage (sudden bleeding in the brain), the most serious type of stroke. "Single-pill combination antihypertensive therapy has great potential to improve hypertension control in the US and worldwide. Most patients with hypertension need multiple therapies to achieve their blood pressure goals. The new dose options available with Widaplik offer a treatment regimen that could benefit a broad range of patients, including those just starting treatment," Paul Whelton, MD, Show Chwan chair of global public health at Tulane University in New Orleans and past president of the World Hypertension League, said in a statement. Widaplik is a medicine made of three drugs that work together to help lower blood pressure. Two of them, telmisartan and amlodipine, relax blood vessels so blood can flow more easily. The third, indapamide, helps your body get rid of extra water by making you pee more. Widaplik comes in three strengths: 10/1.25/0.625 mg, 20/2.5/1.25 mg, and 40/5/2.5 mg. Low blood pressure – which can make you feel faint or dizzy – was the most common side effect, the company said. Patients who pass out should stop taking the medication and consult their doctor.

New paper sheds light on experience of Black prisoners in infamous Stateville prison malaria experiments
New paper sheds light on experience of Black prisoners in infamous Stateville prison malaria experiments

Chicago Tribune

timean hour ago

  • Chicago Tribune

New paper sheds light on experience of Black prisoners in infamous Stateville prison malaria experiments

Much has been said and written over the years about controversial malaria research conducted on inmates at Illinois' Stateville Penitentiary starting in the 1940s. But at least one part of that story has been largely ignored until now: the role of Black prisoners in that research, which helped lead to the modern practice of using genetic testing to understand how individual patients will react to certain medications, according to the authors of a newly published paper out of the University of Utah. 'We want to highlight the stories of Black prisoners that participated in this prison research in the 1950s onward and give them their due,' said Hannah Allen, a medical ethicist and assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and first author of the paper, which was published as an opinion piece Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. 'They haven't been properly acknowledged in the past, and their participation in these studies was really foundational in launching the field of pharmacogenetics and, later on, precision medicine,' said Allen, who recently completed her doctorate at the University of Utah. Starting in the 1940s, researchers infected inmates at the Joliet-area prison with malaria to test the effectiveness of drugs to treat the illness as part of a U.S. military-funded effort to protect American troops overseas, according to the paper. A University of Chicago doctor was the principal investigator. The inmates consented to being part of the studies and were paid for their participation. At first, the research was greeted with enthusiasm. In 1945, Life magazine ran a spread about it, featuring a photo of a Stateville inmate with cups containing malaria-carrying mosquitoes pressed against his bare chest. The first line of the story reads, 'In three U.S. penitentiaries men who have been imprisoned as enemies of society are now helping science fight another enemy of society.' But as the years passed, attitudes began to shift. Questions arose about whether inmates could truly, freely consent to participate in medical experiments or whether they felt coerced into them because of their often dire circumstances. At the Nuremberg trials, defense attorneys for Nazi doctors introduced text and images from the Life article about Stateville prison, though an Illinois physician argued at the trials that the prisoners in Stateville consented to being part of medical research whereas Nazi prisoners did not, according to the JAMA paper. In the mid-1970s, news broke about a study at Tuskegee, in which Black men with syphilis went untreated for years — news that raised awareness of ethical problems in medical research. News outlets also began publishing more stories about prison research, according to the JAMA article. The Chicago Tribune published an article in 1973, in which an inmate participating in the Stateville malaria research said: 'I've been coerced into the project — for the money. Being here has nothing to do with 'doing good for mankind' … I didn't want to keep taking money from my family.' The experiments at Stateville came to a halt in the 1970s. A number of protections and regulations are now in place when it comes to research involving prisoners. Since the 1970s, the Stateville research has often been discussed and analyzed but little attention has been paid to its Black participants, said James Tabery, a medical ethicist and philosophy professor at the University of Utah who led the new research, which was funded by the federal National Institutes of Health. For a time, Black prisoners were excluded from the studies because of a myth that Black people were immune to malaria, Tabery said. Later on, once scientists had pinpointed the drug primaquine as an effective medication for malaria, they turned their attention to the question of why 5% to 10% of Black men experienced a violent reaction to the drug, according to the paper. Ultimately, the scientists were successful, finding that the adverse reaction was related to a specific genetic deficiency. 'There are people all over Chicago today that are getting tested, that clinicians are recommending they get a genetic test before they get prescribed a drug because they want to make sure that their patient isn't going to have an adverse reaction to the drug,' Tabery said. 'It's really sort of powerful and interesting that you can trace that approach to doing good clinical medicine right back to this particular moment and place and population.' But Tabery and Allen also found that the Black prisoners were not treated the same as the white prisoners who participated in research at Stateville. For one, they weren't paid as much as the white prisoners, the rationale being that the white prisoners were infected with malaria, whereas the Black prisoners were given the drug but not infected with the disease — though some of the Black prisoners got very ill after taking the medication, according to the paper. Also, researchers didn't protect the Black participants' privacy as well as they did for other participants. They published certain identifying information about the Black participants, such as initials, ages, heights and weights, whereas participants in the previous research were represented with case numbers, according to the paper. Researchers also recruited the Black prisoners' family members for the study, which they didn't do with earlier participants, according to the paper. 'You see them just doing things with the Black prisoners that they're not doing with the white prisoners,' Tabery said. Also, though scientists made an important discovery through the research on Black prisoners, the episode also highlights the difficulty that can occur in translating discoveries into real life help for patients. Though the World Health Organization now recommends genetic testing to protect people who are sensitive to antimalarials, many of the people who would benefit most from such testing still don't receive it because of financial barriers, supply chain issues and a lack of training, according to the paper. 'What we found is when you sort of shift to what was happening to the Black prisoners, these other lessons you hadn't thought of as being derivable from Stateville suddenly do become apparent,' Tabery said.

CDC backtracks on layoffs, rehires more than 400 people
CDC backtracks on layoffs, rehires more than 400 people

Yahoo

timean hour ago

  • Yahoo

CDC backtracks on layoffs, rehires more than 400 people

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is reinstating more than 400 people who had received layoff notices, according to an email from CDC leadership to employees seen by POLITICO. The rehiring, announced internally today, marks the largest number of employees that the agency has asked back to date. Around half of those employees are in the National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention, and around a third are in the National Center for Environmental Health. Other divisions seeing reinstatements include the National Center for Health Statistics, Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, Office of Human Resources, Global Health Center, Office of Acquisition Services and Office of Communications. HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He told Fox News, which first reported the news: 'The Trump Administration is committed to protecting essential services — whether it's supporting coal miners and firefighters through [the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health], safeguarding public health through lead prevention, or researching and tracking the most prevalent communicable diseases.' — Key context: In April, roughly 2,400 CDC employees received termination notices amid a massive reorganization of the Department of Health and Human Services. But the agency has periodically rehired staff over the past few months.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store