Optimism about 2018 despite opioid crisis and climbing death toll
Posted December 31, 2017 12:56 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – It’s been recognized a public health emergency for more than 18 months, but BC’s opioid crisis is showing no signs of slowing down.
As we head into the New Year some changes have been made to how the province approaches the overdose epidemic.
The BC Centre for Disease Control is planning to expand access to a safer heroin alternative, hydromorphone.
Sarah Blyth with the Overdose Prevention Society says she is optimistic about the province’s ability to tackle the crisis in the new year.
“What the government needs to do in 2018 is really roll out the drug replacement therapy.”
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She adds those measures will go some way to addressing the crisis.
“They just have to roll it out on a large scale. It can’t just be another hundred people, it needs to be thousands of people.”
Doctor Emily Newhouse with Vancouver Coastal Health says take-home naloxone kits are now more readily available.
“If anyone would like to have access to Naloxone and they don’t have it yet, they can either call pharmacies or they can also 811 to find out the nearest site.”
But she says there’s no real way to predict when there’ll be a spike in overdoses.
“We think that varies a lot with how much fentanyl’s contaminating the drug supply but also what interventions are taking place.”
Illicit overdoses claimed more than 1,200 lives in BC between January and October 2017. Fentanyl was detected in 83 per cent of those cases.
