Fentanyl almost killed my son: US official
‘Opioid epidemic will be my top priority’
NEW YORK, July 17, (Agencies): The head of the nation’s top public health agency says the opioid epidemic will be one of his priorities, and he revealed a personal reason for it: His son almost died from taking cocaine contaminated with the powerful painkiller fentanyl.
“For me, it’s personal. I almost lost one of my children from it,” Dr Robert Redfield Jr told the annual conference of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
The AP viewed a video of his speech, which he delivered Thursday in New Orleans. Redfield declined to speak about it Monday, except to say in a statement: “It’s important for society to embrace and support families who are fighting to win the battle of addiction — because stigma is the enemy of public health.”
Redfield mentioned his younger son while talking about his priorities for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he started as director in March. He listed the opioid crisis first, calling it “the public health crisis of our time.”
Public records show that the son, a 37-year-old musician, was charged with drug possession in 2016 in Maryland. The outcome of the case is not available in public records.
Dr Umair Shah, the head of Houston’s county health department, applauded the CDC director’s moment of candor.
“It was definitely an intimate moment that grabbed the audience of public health professionals,” said Shah, who just finished a term as president of the association.
About 70,000 Americans died of drug overdoses last year, according to preliminary CDC numbers released last week. That’s a 10 percent increase from the year before.
Most of the deaths involved opioids, which are driving the deadliest drug overdose epidemic in US history. Growing numbers of recent deaths have been attributed to fentanyl and fentanyl-like drugs, which are relatively cheap and are sometimes cut by suppliers into heroin, cocaine or other drugs without buyers’ knowledge.
Hormones given to people to align their sex with their gender pose a significant risk of serious blood clots and stroke among transgender women, one of the largest studies of transgender patients has concluded.
The risk of a dangerous type of blood clot, called a venous thromboembolism, nearly doubles for people transitioning from male to female compared to both non-transgender men and women, researchers reported in Annals of Internal Medicine.
The risk seems to come from hormone therapy. Among transgender women who had started the therapy, the clot risk was five-fold higher after two years of follow-up compared to non-transgender men and three times higher compared to non-transgender women.
And although women have lower rates of heart disease than men, the odds of stroke and heart attack for transgender women remain the same as they would be if they had not transitioned.
Confirm
For transgender men, the researchers could not confirm any health risks because number of incidents was too small.
The study did not look at specific formulations, combinations or doses of the hormones used in gender confirming therapy, so it remains possible that some regimens pose a lower risk than others and that’s where future research should focus, senior author Michael Goodman, a professor of epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta, told Reuters Health in a telephone interview.
“These risks need to be weighed against the important benefits of treatment,” he said. “Our hope is people will understand we’re not trying to scare anybody. We’re just saying there are some questions that need to be answered to guide the therapy. Risks comes with benefits, and benefits come with risks. It takes a thoughtful healthcare provider and a well-educated patient to make an informed decision.”
“I don’t think this would dissuade anyone” from transitioning because the process is so important to those who feel they need it, Dr Alice Chang, an assistant professor in the division of endocrinology, metabolism, diabetes and nutrition at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, told Reuters Health by phone.
Chang, who was not involved in the research, said most doctors usually discuss such risks with patients, based on suggestions of an elevated risk of heart disease and stroke seen in smaller studies of people who have received hormone therapy for other reasons.
Until now, the data on whether gender confirming medical therapy treatment poses cardiovascular risks has been sparse.
The Goodman study used the cases of 2,842 transgender women and 2,118 transgender men. They were treated in California and Georgia in the Kaiser Permanente health system. They typically had been followed for about four years and only about 23 percent had undergone gender confirmation surgery.
The records of 48,686 men and 48,775 women who had not undergone gender confirming treatment, all matched for race, ethnicity and year of birth, were used for comparison.