Health officials fighting opioid overdose numbers are waiting for a “tidal wave” as stress from the pandemic wears on addicts and patients taking the drugs.
While states aren’t yet reporting the full impact of how the pandemic is hitting people in danger of overdosing, Dr. Sarah Wakeman, an addiction medicine specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, said the country is in the middle of a “slow tsunami of deaths” from drug overdoses, according to the Boston Herald.
Meanwhile, the U.S. FDA is in the spotlight for having been so lax in approving opioids all the way back to the 1990s, Gizmodo reports. A recent study found that “the FDA has routinely approved new opioid drugs or new formulations of existing drugs on the basis of limited evidence from clinical trials and often with little information on their potential safety risks,” Gizmodo said.
SOURCES:
Boston Herald September 22, 2020
Gizmodo September 28, 2020