As opioid crisis spreads, treatments remain underutilized (Daily Record)

The opioid epidemic raging across the country recognizes few boundaries. Its victims are young and old, the highly educated and high school dropouts, rich and poor, women and men.

Baltimore City Health Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen said that one of the many obstacles to overcome in treating opioid misuse is the pernicious stigma that attaches to drug addiction. It isn’t a moral failure, but rather a chronic malady that should be treated and managed with the same level of attention as diabetes and heart disease are.

A solid step toward addressing the issue is to first stop people from dying, Wen said. In the past two years, the city has helped train some 23,000 people how to use Nalaxone, a prescription medication that blocks or reverses symptoms of opioid overdose. She said the training has helped save over 1,000 lives.

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Lead poisoning cases fell 19 percent in Baltimore last year, even as more children tested for exposure (Baltimore Sun)

The number of Baltimore children with lead poisoning fell 19 percent in 2017, even as more children were tested for exposure to the powerful neurotoxin.

Statewide, the number of Maryland children found to have elevated levels of lead in their blood held steady even as the number of children tested increased by 10 percent, according to a Maryland Department of the Environment report released Tuesday.

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Trump declared an emergency over opioids. A new report finds it led to very little. (Vox)

To much fanfare last year, President Donald Trump ordered his administration to declare a public health emergency over the opioid epidemic. “As Americans, we cannot allow this to continue,” Trump said at the time. “It is time to liberate our communities from this scourge of drug addiction.”

When I’ve asked experts about these approaches, it’s not that any of them are bad. It’s that they fall short. For instance, Leana Wen, the former health commissioner of Baltimore (and soon-to-be president of Planned Parenthood), said that the Support for Patients and Communities Act “is simply tinkering around the edges.”

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Azar Unveils Plan to Help Pregnant Patients Quit Opioids (MedPage Today)

States will get help from the federal government integrating services for pregnant and postpartum Medicaid patients with opioid use disorder under a pilot program announced Tuesday by Health and Hu