Latest news with #OverdoseDatatoAction
The Hill
2 days ago
- Health
- The Hill
CDC to restore overdose prevention funds
Grant recipients had been sounding the alarm after the administration held up money that had already been appropriated to the CDC's Overdose Data to Action (OD2A) program. Advocacy groups on Tuesday said they had been informed the program will be fully funded. Raynard Washington, health director of Mecklenburg County in North Carolina, told reporters on Monday that the program had previously only been guaranteed half its $280 million apportionment. That funding is now going to be distributed, though grantees had not yet been told. 'Every delay, every spending freeze — these translate to lost time and lives,' Sharon Gilmartin, director of the Safe States Alliance, a public health advocacy group, told reporters Monday. 'There has been a lack of transparency in the [funding] process,' Gilmartin told The Hill Tuesday, 'The people that suffer are the communities and the people doing the work.' CDC's OD2A cooperative agreement provides funding to 90 health departments. NPR first reported last month that the administration had delayed and might cancel about $140 million of the program's grants. It was also first to report on the restoration of funding. The Office of Management and Budget told The Hill it was never withholding funding, and CDC had the authority to release the funds.
Yahoo
22-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Health experts warn Trump cuts to the CDC could hurt overdose prevention: ‘A step backwards'
Public health officials across the country working to prevent overdose deaths may have just a month to prepare for up to $140m in funding cuts for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that the Trump administration has reportedly withheld. US overdose deaths began to decline for the first time in 2023 after climbing for over two decades. The CDC's Overdose Data to Action (OD2A) cooperative agreement, launched in 2019 during the first Trump administration, provides funding for overdose 'prevention and surveillance strategies'. Public health officials emphasized to the Guardian that to effectively reduce fatal overdoses, agencies must work in tandem to track substance use disorders, overdoses and changes in the drug supply, and to implement interventions, like distributing the overdose reversal drug naloxone. OD2A funding made this kind of robust response possible. The Biden administration expanded the program in 2023, giving five year grants to 90 state and local public health departments. Related: How to help people with addictions on the streets? These Oregon programs have solutions 'The funding has largely been used for surveillance, in other words, to obtain data on the opioid crisis that informs a public health response to the problem,' said Dr Andrew Kolodny, medical director for the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University. 'In general, our surveillance data for the opioid crisis is awful. I would even say that one of the reasons that the opioid crisis is as severe as it is, and why, up until recently, overdose deaths have continued to go up pretty much year after year for about 25 years, is because we had very poor surveillance of the problem.' But now, health officials worry the money could run out at the end of the first two year cycle on 1 September. Dr Jenny Hua, interim deputy commissioner for Chicago's department of public health (CDPH), which receives $3.4m annually in OD2A funding, says they're preparing for the worst. 'We are doing scenario planning. The preferred scenario is that we have the entire award starting the first of August,' she said, though she's uncertain whether that's likely. Hua noted that what she's been 'told about this money is that at least half of it is available next year. The problem is that for a number of [the CDC's] cooperative agreements with local health departments and state health departments, they're receiving that money in monthly increments, which has never happened before.' She also said that the CDC now doesn't have enough money at once to distribute. A Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson said in a statement that CDC is committed to the O2DA program and that: 'We are working closely with our funding partners to make within the next month, at a minimum, initial grant awards, which may contain less than the full-year of funding in the first incremental award … This incremental funding approach is not specific to OD2A.' Hua said 'that sort of fog is making it incredibly difficult for us to make funding decisions, to allocate our resources.' The CDPH has used OD2A funding to make same day substance use disorder treatment available to patients through telehealth, and had plans to expand recovery housing for treatment. 'Do you pull the plug? What tea leaves are we supposed to read, to know what course of action to take?' Hao wondered. Kolodny said it's especially important to keep funding surveillance of multiple factors related to overdose deaths because 'right now, you can talk to five different experts, and you'll get five different explanations for why the deaths are coming down. Nobody really knows, right? And that's because we don't have good surveillance data,' he said, 'and it's about to get worse.' Surveillance means tracking not only the number of fatal and non-fatal overdoses in the US, but also the prevalence of substance use disorders, including opioid use disorder. Historically, this has been the mission of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (Samhsa), which also provides a plethora of other addiction and overdose prevention services, but that agency also faces funding cuts. OD2A funding also went towards surveillance of 'emergency drug threats' which often comes in the form of new adulterants in the street drug supply. Unexpected substances, including tranquilizers like xylazine, and potent synthetic opioids like nitazenes and carfentanil, can cause overdoses and poisonings that are more dangerous because they aren't yet well understood. Still, many health departments across the country do not monitor the street drug supply. Street drug surveillance can help officials intervene rapidly when overdoses increase. Partly thanks to OD2A funding, Chicago health officials immediately became aware of a spike in overdoses on the city's west side last May. Lab analysis revealed the spike was related to the presence of medetomidine, a potent veterinary tranquilizer, in the street drug supply. In June, the CDPH launched the Summer Opioid Response Incident Command System, a coordinated effort involving public messaging about the contaminated drug supply, distribution of naloxone and drug testing kits, and expanding access to treatment. This effort reduced overdose related emergency responses by 23% last summer compared to the year before, according to a report on the program. The Los Angeles department of public health also uses OD2A funding for 'community-based drug checking', according to a statement from a spokesperson; 'The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health recently announced a 22% decline in drug-related overdose deaths and poisonings in 2024, the most significant drop in LA County history,' adding that 'the CDC Overdose to Action LOCAL grant award contributed to these successes.' A spokesperson for the Maryland department of health said that cuts could mean layoffs for 28 public health workers, which would mean they no longer have the capacity to track non-fatal overdoses and will lose most of their capacity to track fatal overdoses. Tracking the number of people who die of overdoses is the 'bare minimum' of surveillance, according to Kolodny, who noted that funding cuts are 'frustrating' to witness. 'Trump has been especially popular in some of the regions of the country that have suffered most from the opioid crisis. So one might think that his administration would be doing everything it can to bring this problem to an end. And in my opinion, this is a step backwards,' he said. Funding overdose prevention doesn't just save lives, it also saves money, Kolodny said: 'The opioid crisis is a trillion dollar a year problem, and I'm not making up that number. That's a number that comes in part from the cost analysis on the number of lives that are lost.' Lives will continue to be lost until we can really understand what drives overdose deaths, Kolodny said: 'Without the data, we're shooting in the dark.'
Scientific American
05-06-2025
- Health
- Scientific American
Inside the Collapse of the America's Overdose Prevention Program
At an addiction conference in Nashville, Tenn., in late April, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., spoke about his own experience with drug use. 'Addiction is a source of misery. It's also a symptom of misery,' he said. Kennedy's very personal speech, however, ignored recent federal budget cuts and staffing reductions that could undo national drug programs' recent progress in reversing overdoses and treating substance use. Several experts in the crowd, including Caleb Banta-Green, a research professor at the University of Washington, who studies addiction, furiously spoke up during Kennedy's speech. Banta-Green interrupted, shouting 'Believe science!' before being removed from the venue. (The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment for this article.) 'I had to stand up and say something,' says Banta-Green, who has spent his career working with people who use drugs and was a senior science adviser at the Office of National Drug Control Policy during the Obama administration. 'The general public needs to understand what is being dismantled and the very real impact it's going to have on them and their loved ones.' On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. The Trump administration has defunded public health programs and made plans to consolidate or eliminate the systems that track their outcomes, making it difficult to monitor the deadly consequences of substance use, Banta-Green says. For instance, staff cuts to the Overdose Data to Action program and the Opioid Overdose Prevention and Surveillance program will hamper former tracking efforts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and at local and state health departments' prevention programs. A recently fired policy analyst at the overdose prevention division at the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control— who wishes to remain anonymous, citing fear of retaliation—tells Scientific American that she used to provide policy support to teams at health departments in 49 states and shared public overdose data and information to Congress. She is a veteran who should have had protected employment status, but she lost her job during federal cuts in February. 'No one else is doing surveillance and data collection and prevention like the CDC was,' she says. 'There's so much that's been cut.' (When approached for an interview by Scientific American, a CDC spokesperson said, 'Honestly, the new administration has changed how things normally work' and did not make anyone available for questions.) What Gets Measured Gets Managed Provisional data suggest that deaths from drug use declined by almost 25 percent in 2024, though overdoses remain the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 44. Cuts to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health will make it difficult to measure similar statistics in the future. Because substance use is highly stigmatized, Banta-Green says it's important to have diverse, localized and timely data from multiple agencies to accurately capture the need for services—and the ways they're actually used. 'You can't design public health or policy responses if you don't know the scale of the need,' he says. Overdose trends vary by region—for example, usage of the synthetic opioid fentanyl appeared earlier on the East Coast than the West—so national averages can obscure critical local patterns. These regional differences can offer important insights into which interventions might be working, Banta-Green says. For instance, important medications such as naloxone rapidly reverse opioid overdoses in emergency situations. But getting people onto long-term medications, including methadone and buprenorphine, which reduce cravings and withdrawal symptoms, can more effectively prevent mortality in both the short and long term. Declining deaths may also mask tragic underlying dynamics. Successful interventions may not be the only cause of a drop in overdoses; it could also be that the people who are most vulnerable to overdose have recently perished and that there are simply fewer remaining at risk. 'It's like a forest fire burning itself out,' Banta-Green says. This underscores the need for the large-scale data collection threatened by the proposed budget and staff cuts at the CDC and National Institutes of Health, says Regina LaBelle, an addiction policy expert at Georgetown University. 'What [the administration is] doing is shortsighted' and doesn't appear to be based 'on the effectiveness or the outcomes of the programs that [it's] cutting,' she says. For example, despite promising to expand naloxone access, the Trump administration's latest budget proposal cuts funding for a critical program that distributes the lifesaving medication to first aid responders. 'A Chance at Redemption' When LaBelle was acting director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy during the Biden administration, she led efforts to expand evidence-based programs that provided clean syringes and tested users' drugs for harmful substances. These strategies are often referred to as 'harm reduction,' which LaBelle describes as 'a way you can meet people where they are and give them the services they need to keep them from dying.' José Martínez, a substance use counselor based in Buffalo, N.Y., says harm-reduction practices helped save his life. When Martínez got his first job as a peer advocate for people using drugs, he was still in a chaotic part of his own addiction and had been sleeping on the street and the subway—and regularly getting into fights—for a decade. The day after he was hired to help provide counseling on hepatitis C, he got into a New York City shelter. As his bruises healed, he learned life skills he was never taught at home. 'For a lot of people, drug use is a coping tool,' he says. 'The drug is rarely the problem. Drug use is really a symptom.' Working with others who understood that many people need help minimizing risks gave Martínez a chance to make progress toward recovery in a way that he says abstinence-only treatment programs couldn't. 'I don't agree that somebody should be sober in order for them to do things different,' he says. Over the past six years working for the National Harm Reduction Coalition, Martínez started a national support network for other peer program workers and community members—people who share their experiences and are a trusted source of education and support for others using drugs. 'There's never no time limit,' he says. 'Everybody works on their own pace.' Though Martínez's program doesn't take federal funding, the Trump administration is cutting similar kinds of peer programs. Martínez says doing this peer work gives many users a sense of purpose and stability—and helps them avoid previous behaviors. The proposed 2026 federal budget will slash the CDC's opioid surveillance programs by $30 million. It also creates a new subdivision called the Administration for a Healthy America that will consolidate the agency's prevention work, along with existing programs at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency (SAMHSA), which often coordinates grants for treatment programs. The programs formerly conducted through SAMHSA are also facing cuts of more than $1 billion. Advocates fear this will include a shift toward funding abstinence-only priorities, which, Martínez says, 'will definitely mean that we're going to have more overdoses.' (Some research suggests abstinence-based treatment actually puts people at a higher risk of fatal overdose than those who receive no treatment at all.) 'The general public needs to understand what is being dismantled and the very real impact it's going to have on them and their loved ones.' —Caleb Banta-Green, addiction research professor These cuts could disproportionately affect communities already facing higher overdose rates: Martínez, who is Puerto Rican, notes that U.S. Black, Latino and Indigenous communities have experienced drug overdose death increases in recent years. In many states, overdose deaths in Black and brown communities remain high while white overdose death rates are declining. Looming cuts to Medicaid programs, LaBelle warns, are likely to worsen inequalities in health care access, which tends to make communities of color more vulnerable. In Kentucky, where Governor Andy Beshear recently celebrated a 30 percent decline in overdose deaths, Shreeta Waldon, executive director of the Kentucky Harm Reduction Coalition, says the reality is more nuanced. While national overdose deaths declined in white populations from 2021 to 2023, for example, they continued to rise among people of color. Black and Latino communities often face barriers when accessing health services, many of which have been shaped by predominantly white institutions. Waldon says it's essential for people from diverse backgrounds to participate in policy decisions and necessary to ensure that opioid abatement funds —legal funds used toward treatment and prevention—are distributed fairly. Without adequate federal funding, Waldon predicts treatment programs in Kentucky will become backlogged—potentially pushing more people into crisis situations that lead to emergency services or incarceration rather than to recovery. These financial and political pressures are not only making it harder to find support for people in crisis; they also reduce opportunities to discuss community needs. Waldon says she knows some social workers who now avoid terms such as 'Black woman' or 'marginalized' in grants and public talks out of fear of losing funding. But people currently needing treatment for substance-use disorder are not necessarily aware of the federal funding news—or 'what's about to hit them when they try to go get treatment and they're hit with barriers,' Waldon says. 'That's way more important to me than trying to tailor the way I talk.' Funding and staffing cuts don't just limit resources for the people most in need. They limit the ability to understand where someone is coming from, which undermines efforts to provide meaningful care, Martínez says. Harm reduction is more than the services and physical tools given to community members, he says. It's about the approach. 'When you look at a whole person, you plant the seed of health and dignity,' he says. 'If everybody deserves a chance at redemption, then we've got to rethink how we're approaching things.'
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Washington overdose deaths decline after years of growth, data show
(Photo by Darwin Brandis/iStock Getty Images Plus) Washington is showing promise in its work to combat the epidemic of drug overdose deaths that has ravaged the state and country in recent years. In 2024, fatal overdoses in the state dropped nearly 11% from the previous year, from 3,512 to 3,137, according to preliminary data released by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 'There's been not a lot of good news in this space, and this is good news,' said Dr. Herbert Duber, regional medical officer at the state Department of Health. 'I think that we need to get more time, though, to see how it sticks.' Last year's total is still nearly 14% higher than the deaths recorded in 2022. Washington saw the downward overdose trend reversed in the last few months of 2024, noted Duber. The past month has also seen a significant increase. Washington's decrease last year was far below the national average of more than 25%. Only two states saw upticks in overdose deaths: Nevada and South Dakota. Nationally, overdose remains the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 44, health officials say. Fatal overdoses had been rising quickly in Washington. In 2019, fewer than 1,300 residents died, according to state data. Highly potent fentanyl drove that rise, along with increased drug use during the pandemic. In 2019, just over 300 people in Washington died from synthetic opioids like fentanyl. By 2023, that had skyrocketed to more than 2,600, according to the state Department of Health. Federal health officials cite the Overdose Data to Action program as a way to continue reducing deaths through statistic-guided prevention efforts. The state Department of Health, as well as the King and Snohomish County health departments, have received federal money under Overdose Data to Action. In Washington, Duber sees increasing access to treatment as a catalyst for the improvement seen last year, especially to the medication buprenorphine meant to treat opioid addiction. Duber, an emergency department physician, will prescribe Suboxone, a medication containing both buprenorphine and naloxone that reduces opioid withdrawal symptoms. 'There's just been an increasing level of comfort and education and engagement on opioids, trying to figure out a way where the healthcare community can really impact this epidemic,' Duber said. The state is looking to keep the progress going. The two-year state budget Gov. Bob Ferguson signed last week included money for a new hotline to facilitate access to services and medication like buprenorphine. The earliest that could be launched is in September, a Department of Health spokesperson said. The goal is to lower barriers as much as possible to give people the chance to get treatment. But the so-called 'big, beautiful bill' the U.S. House passed last month could threaten the progress. The Medicaid program for low-income Americans is the largest payer for opioid use disorder treatment in Washington, according to the state Health Care Authority. The Republican-backed legislation proposes cutting Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade, a move that could cost Washington about $2 billion over the next four years and force around 194,000 to lose coverage, local leaders have warned.
