Pitt professor works to get accurate, detailed drug overdose information
(Harrisburg) — Getting a true sense of the impact of the opioid crisis is difficult in Pennsylvania.
WITF has reported that the state doesn’t have up-to-date, accurate information.
But one professor is making an effort to provide more help.
Professor Jeanine Buchanich at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health is examining death certificates from 1999 to 2015.
She’s hoping to gather information about what drugs contributed to each overdose death, where the overdose occurred, and demographic details like age, sex, and perhaps even job status.
Buchanich says she may be able to tear down some stereotypes with her work.
“I think we may. Honestly, I think there could be some surprising pieces of information that we are able to tease out with the detail and level of information that we have with this data,” says Buchanich.
But she recognizes the state has no one standard for county coroners to classify a drug overdose.
“We are of course limited, to the extent that medical examiners and coroners are putting information on to the death certificate, so only if heroin is noted on the death certificate with it get a heroin code for example,” she adds.
State agencies don’t have up-to-date, accurate statistics on drug overdoses either.
Although a private group has provided more detailed information in the past two years, it’s still incomplete.
The information is critical because it is used to develop solutions to the drug overdose crisis.
Public health experts have frequently cited the need for accurate, up-to-date statistics to get a handle on the drug overdose crisis.
Filed under: General Problems
Hmmm,,I am looking up this professors email,,and emailen them,,asking them to no forget that no humanbeing would ever want to live a life time in physical pain,,as a cause for some of these o.d.’s,,,,Also in regards to marijuana use,,,I don’t,,I do not like thee extra brain fog I get,that I do not get w/my medicines,,However,,my deceased brother,,and his living daughter swore by it for their migrains and my brother also swore by it for chemo,,,Just like all plants that provide medicinal uses,,,they all should be legal jmo,,the marijuana plant,,the coca plant and thee poppy flower,,I believe,,should all be legal in sufficient personal quantities to be used for pain management…maryw
Oh, I am certain that she will encounter no problems at all in her quest to compile accurate data regarding overdose deaths in Pennsylvania.
I can say that she is one brave determined soul.
I wish her luck , just for that reason of inaccurate causes of death due to over doses should not make people be denied medical intervention for chronic pain patients . To not treat chronic pain is torture , the number should have been concrete before they started this attack on chronic pain patients . If the government even had one once of empathy for people in chronic pain they would have legalized Cannibis .
I agree with the above poster. When is a change going to happen? I hear a lot of rants but no one is planning a march???
Why isn’t each state County by county doing this? It seems to me that if this overdose crisis was as bad as the federal government says that it is then they would want to get to the root of it all.