A little good news on the opioid crisis
There is some tentatively good news in Niagara about the ongoing opioid crisis, says Niagara’s acting medical officer of health.
In a Monday interview with The Standard, Dr. Mustafa Hirji said the number of overdoser elated calls Niagara EMS paramedics are responding to has recently dipped slightly.
Hirji also said the severity of the calls — measured by how often paramedics need to use the anti-overdose drug Naloxone on patients — has also decreased.
“We saw a real peak in the summer and fall and things have decreased somewhat since then,” said Hirji.
“That could be in part because we made a real push to tell people to call 911, and so there was an increase in 911 calls at the time. The other reason may be because we pushed for people to be aware of and use Naloxone.”
However, Hirji cautioned that ambulance calls are only a single indicator of what is happening in a larger, very complex problem.
The EMS data does not indicate the number of drug users, the total number of opioid overdoses, nor the number of people who may have used Naloxone but didn’t call an ambulance or selfadmitted to hospital.
In the fall, Niagara Health
reported a 65 per cent increase in the number of opioid overdoses in its emergency room over 2016 and at the time, data released by the Canadian Institute of Health Information showed Niagara had one of the highest rates of opioid overdoes in the nation.
An NHS spokesman was not immediately available for this story.
Hiji said it is unclear how many overdose deaths Niagara has had recently.
The Ontario coroner’s officewhose data public health units use to determine how many people have died due to overdoses — last released data for July 2017. More recent information hasn’t been compiled.
While the number of EMS calls may have declined, Hirji said he doesn’t believe the situation on the street has changed much since the summer.
“There was a great deal of concern that carfentanil (an opioid an order of magnitude more dangerous than fentanyl) was going to become more prevalent, but that doesn’t appear to have really happened,” he said. “But fentanyl remains a very real problem.”
Fentanyl, an opioid several times more powerful than morphine, is widely considered to be the driving force behind the rising tide of opioid overdoses in Canada. It is commonly mixed with other street drugs, including methamphetamines and heroin, resulting in many users taking fentanyl without realizing it.