The rapid rise in prescription opioid and heroin use in the United States has drawn significant public attention in the past several years. Between 2000 and 2015, over half a million Americans died from a prescription opioid or heroin overdose, and 91 Americans continue to die each day from opioid overdoses.
Because heroin and opioids are often injected, they contribute to the spread of HIV and hepatitis C (HCV) through needle sharing. In 2013, deaths from HCV surpassed the number of deaths from the next 60 leading infectious diseases, combined. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that there may be as many as 30,000 new cases of HCV each year due to injection drug use.
[For more of this story, written by Sarah Ziegenhorn, go to http://blogs.biomedcentral.com...le-exchange-opioids/]
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