From 2006 to 2016, opioid death rate nearly doubled, report says. The rate of opioid overdose deaths in Travis County, including those from heroin and prescription pain medication, nearly doubled from 2006 to 2016, according to data released by the Austin Public Health Department.
In 2006, Travis County averaged four deaths per 100,000 residents. The rated jumped to 7.5 deaths per 100,000 residents in 2016. The figures, from a report in the latest edition of the Travis County Medical Society Journal, were released Tuesday amid what health experts are describing as a nationwide opioid overdose epidemic.
In 2016, more than 42,000 people in the United States died from prescription opioids, heroin and fentanyl — more than any other year on record, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Huang
Dr. Philip Huang, the medical director at the health department and the study’s co-author, said the number of deaths related to opioids in Travis County is still relatively small compared with other metropolitan areas across the country. However, it is important to give a picture of what is happening in our area with the hope that policymakers can get ahead of the crisis, he said.
Huang suggested a number of steps to mitigate the problem, such as increasing the access to substance abuse treatment, improving prescription drug monitoring tools and boosting the availability of the drug naloxone, which can reverse the effects of opioids.
Here are some of the key findings from the recently released data:
■3,600: Calls to Texas Poison Center Network from Travis County for opioid exposure between 2000 and 2017.
■ 1, 398: Drug overdose deaths in Travis County from 2006 to 2016.
■127: Average number of drug overdose deaths each year in Travis County.
■66.5: Number of prescriptions for opioids per 100 people by doctors nationwide.
■51. 2: Number of prescriptions for opioids per 100 people by doctors in Travis County. While this number is significantly lower than the national average, Huang admits it is still disturbingly high. He said doctors over prescribing pain medication has been the driver of the opioid epidemic.
“That was thought to have led to a lot of the problems we are seeing,” he said. “A lot of those prescriptions have been diverted and misused.”
■ 42. 2: Percent of overdose deaths related to opioids like heroin, methadone and prescription narcotics.
■ 14 .4: Percent of deaths related to cocaine, the next most common drug blamed in Travis County overdoses.
■ 2: Number of times as many men overdose on opioids as women. Similarly, two times as many white people as black people and 21/2 times as many white people as Hispanics overdose on opioids.
Huang said this is different than what researchers see with other abused drugs.
“It is a different demographic that is being impacted,” he said. “This has been largely driven by this increase in prescribed medications.”
Additional data also released recently, however, show a dramatic drop last year in the number of prescriptions being filled in the U.S. for opioid painkillers — the sharpest decline in 25 years, according to the health data firm IQVIA’s Institute for Human Data Science.
The report showed on average that the number of opioid prescriptions filled by pharmacies dropped 8.9 percent nationwide last year. All 50 states and the District of Columbia had declines of more than 5 percent and those states hardest hit by the opioid epidemic, like West Virginia and Pennsylvania, saw drops of more than 10 percent, the data show.
Health experts attributed the decline to increasing legal restrictions and public awareness.
