by Public health civil servants in the whole country who are working on the prevention of deaths for overdoses may only have one month to prepare for up to 140 million US dollars for funding for the centers for the control and prevention of illnesses (CDC), which the Trump administration has reportedly held back.
The death overdose of the deaths started in 2023 for the first time after climbing for over two decades.
The cooperation agreement of the CDC overdose data on the action (OD2A), which was launched in 2019 during the first Trump administration, offers funds for overdose “prevention and surveillance strategies”. Public health officers emphasized the guardian that the agencies work together to effectively reduce stale overdoses in order to pursue disorders of substance consumption, overdoses and changes in the supply of drugs and to implement interventions, e.g. OD2A financing made this type of robust answer possible.
The bidding administration expanded the 2023 program and granted 90 state and local health departments five -year grants.
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“The financing was largely used for surveillance to obtain data on the opioid crisis that inform a reaction of public health to the problem, ”said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, medical director for the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University.
“In general, our surveillance data for the opioid crisis is terrible. I would even say that one of the reasons why the opioid crisis is so serious and why, until recently, deaths about overdose have been pretty much increasing for about 25 years.
But now health officers fear that the money could end at the end of the first two -year cycle on September 1st.
Dr. Jenny Hua, Deputy Commissioner for Public Health (CDPh) in Chicago, who receives USD 3.4 million in OD2A financing, says that they are preparing for the worst.
“We make scenario management. The preferred scenario is that we have the entire award from August,” she said, even though she is not sure whether this is likely.
Hua noticed that what was told about this money [the CDC’s] Cooperative agreements with local health departments and state health departments receive this money in monthly steps, which has never happened before. “
She also said that the CDC does not have enough money at once to distribute it.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Health and Human Services said in a statement that CDC was obliged to do the O2DA program and: “We work closely with our financing partners to make at least initial grants that may contain less than the overall year of funding in the first incremental award. This incremental financing approach is not specific for OD2a.” “
Hua said: “This type of fog makes it incredibly difficult for us to make financing decisions and assign our resources.”
The CDPh has used OD2A financing to provide patients with substance consumer disorders through telemedicine and had plans to expand the accommodation for treatment.
“Pull the plug? Which tea leaves should we read to know what measures have to take?” Hao wondered.
Kolodny said it was particularly important to further finance the monitoring of several factors in connection with overdose dead, as they can speak to five different experts at the moment, and they receive five different explanations for why deaths are falling. Nobody really knows, right? And that is because we don’t have good surveillance data.
Monitoring means not only pursuing the number of fatal and non -fatal overdoses in the United States, but also the prevalence of substance consumption disorders, including opioid consumption disorder. In the past, this was the mission of the administration of drug abuse and mental health services (SAMHSA), which also offers a large number of other addiction and overdose prevention services, but this agency is also exposed to financing cuts.
OD2A financing also went into the monitoring of “emergency threats”, which is often carried out in the form of new adulterers in the supplementary drug supplement. Unexpected substances, including sedatives such as xylazine and strong synthetic opioids such as nitazene and carfenanil, can cause overdosing and poisoning that are more dangerous because they are not yet well understood.
Nevertheless, many health departments across the country do not monitor the Street Drug Supply.
The monitoring of the road drug additives can help the officials to intervene quickly if overdoses increase. In some cases, thanks to the OD2A financing, the Chicago health officials became aware of an overdose on the city’s west side last May last May.
The laboratory analysis showed that the spike was related to the presence of medetomidine, a strong animal amount, in road medication. In June, the CDPh started the Summer Opioid Response Incident Command System, a coordinated effort, public news about the contaminated pharmaceutical supply, the distribution of naloxone and drug test kits and the expansion of access to the treatment. These efforts reduced the emergency answers by 23% last summer compared to the previous year, as can be seen from a report on the program.
The Ministry of Public Health in Los Angeles also uses OD2A financing for “drug control based in the municipality”, as can be seen from a spokesman’s statement. “The Department of Public Health in Los Angeles County recently announced a decline in deaths and poisoning in connection with drugs in connection with drugs in 2024.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Health in Maryland said that cuts could mean layoffs for 28 workers in public healthcare, which could mean that they no longer have the ability to pursue not fatal overdoses and to lose most of their ability to pursue fatal overdoses.
According to Kolodny, who found that the funding cuts are “frustrating” to testify to witness, it is the “naked minimum” of surveillance to pursue the number of people who die of overdoses.
“Trump was particularly popular in some regions of the country who suffered the most from the opioid crisis. So you could think that his government would do anything to end this problem. And in my opinion this is a step backwards,” he said.
Financing an overdose prevention not only saves life, but also money, Kolodny said: “The opioid crisis is a trillion dollar a year, and I do not make this number. This is a number that goes back from the cost analysis about the number of lost human life.”
Life will continue to be lost until we can really understand what deaths overdose, said Kolodny: “Without the data, we shoot in the dark.”
