In an effort to better monitor and enhance the medical protection for prescribing of opioid painkillers, CDC offers to grant $3.7 M to prescription drug abuse. According to Courtney Phillips, CEO of DHHS, overdose as well as prescription drug abuse and misuse is a growing problem in many states across America.
The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will grant Tennessee a 4-year, $3.4 million grant to help fight prescription drug abuse. California and Vermont are also among the list of 16 states that will receive the CDC grant.
The states are expected to use themselves some of the additional funding in order to study and respond to the increase in heroin overdose deaths across America. They will also have to investigate the connection between prescription opioid abuse and heroin use, as stated by CDC. The Federal grants will be used to target interventions in countries with some of the highest rates of drug overdoses, such as Fayette, Jefferson, Fayette, Kenton, Boone and Campbell.
Dr. Karen Smith, director of the CDPH and state well-being officer, declared that the issue of misuse of prescription can show harmful for anybody. He added that people typically affiliate drug abuse with unlawful medicine, but the Federal grant effort targets this time the misuse of medicine that have been prescribed for cache administration.
The grant will be released on several phases. For instance, the division's Violence and Damage Prevention Program will get $940,000 a year over the subsequent 4 years. The division will utilize the funds to battle the epidemic of prescription drug overdose.
According to official statistics, in the year 2013, more than 16,000 individuals misplaced their lives from prescription opioid overdoses in America. In the same year, in California there have been 4,318 deaths from drug poisonings. The most common prescribed drug for the overdose has been opioids.
According to the CDC, since 1999 overdoses have quadrupled, with more than 16,000 people dying of opioid overdoses in 2013 alone. According to healthcare officials, it is difficult to protect people from becoming addicted to opioids, and for this reason they need to take fast action now, with safer prescribing practices, real-time tracking programs and rapid response.
The grant money funding is part of a new CDC program called Prescription Drug Overdose: Prevention for States. The program aims to provide federal expertise and resources to states in order to help to prevent overdose deaths related to prescription painkillers.
