Are fatal drug overdoses being undercounted?
Butler County Coroner William Young III said opioid overdose deaths for 2018 — the county currently has 15 confirmed and eight cases pending — continue to come from a combination of Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is 100 times more potent than morphine, and other drugs.
Young said he's not sure why the county has seen such a sharp decline in deadly overdoses this year.He believes it's due to a combination of factors — increased pressure from law enforcement on dealers and traffickers, and more awareness of how deadly synthetic opioids can be.
“I think people are smartening up. Naloxone helps too,” Young said. “They're knocking the dealers down all over, too. I just hope it continues; the slowdown. I wish everything would stay the way it is, and we wouldn't get any.”
Recent research on the epidemic has uncovered another wrinkle for public health experts to consider as well: incomplete reporting.
In a study published Wednesday, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh reported that Pennsylvania likely leads the nation in unreported opioid-related deaths.
The report concluded that nationwide 70,000 opioid-related deaths likely went unreported from 1999 to 2015 because of incomplete or inaccurate death records.
Pennsylvania, the report found, had more than 11,000 fatal drug overdoses reported as “unspecified” over that time period. That represents a huge problem for public health officials, said Dr. Jeanine Buchanich, the study's lead author.
“If a drug (death) is being unspecified, then you really don't know the breadth of the epidemic,” Buchanich said in an interview Wednesday.
There was no indication in the report that any opioid-related deaths went unreported in Butler County, and Young said he wasn't aware of the research and couldn't comment on the researchers' conclusions.
Buchanich said researchers did not look at data from individual counties and only probed statewide numbers.
She said drilling deeper into the data and investigating whether underreporting was a particular issue in specific counties — or for specific categories of decedents — is one way in which the team hopes to build on its work.
“We do know that the information is not getting onto the death certificate and getting coded,” she said. “There are different possibilities for that, including a lack of resources to deal with the opioid epidemic.”
