PORT ANGELES — Health officials in Clallam County, the first county in the state to mandate opioid overdose reporting, have reported 41 opioid drug overdoses, including five fatalities, in the first six months of the year.
Seventy-three percent of the known overdoses between Jan. 1 and June 30 were caused by heroin. The rest were the result of prescription medications with brand names like Vicodin, Percocet or OxyContin, according to new data.
Clallam County this year became the first in the state to mandate the reporting of fatal and non-fatal opioid overdoses by hospital emergency rooms and the county coroner.
Dr. Christopher Frank, the Clallam County health officer who spearheaded the reporting requirement, shared the data with the county Board of Health on Tuesday.
The data will be used to help prevent opioid misuse and abuse, to treat opioid addiction and to prevent overdoses in the future, Frank said.
“Really we think of it as a pipeline, a continuum, from people becoming addicted, to not being able to have effective treatment to then being at risk for overdoses and us not being able to really measure what’s going on,” Frank told the Board of Health.
Jefferson County recently started an opioid overdose recording system that is similar to Clallam County’s.
Because the system is so new — only three months old — there have been no overdoses officially recorded in the county, said Dr. Thomas Locke, Jefferson County health officer.
Since the county began distributing naloxone — a fast-acting drug that reverses opioid overdose — through its syringe-exchange program, two users have reported using their kits, he said.
In the last three months, the county has distributed 21 naloxone kits, Locke said.
The recording system tracks overdoses in cases where a user is taken to the emergency room or if the coroner is called, Locke said.
“Jefferson County is not immune from the problem, but it’s not as severe as in Clallam,” Locke said.
Aids intervention
Opioid overdose reporting allows for intervention when many users are susceptible to change, health officials said.
“We are not collecting this information just to collect information,” Frank said in news release.
“Our public health nurses and chemical dependency expert have been able to reach out to patients right after their overdose to offer them drug treatment referrals and naloxone to decrease their risk of dying from an overdose in the future.”
Naloxone is an opioid antagonist that reverses the effects of heroin or opioid-based prescription pills. It has been shown to save lives by allowing a patent to breathe long enough for medical help to arrive.
Syringe exhange program
Ninety-four percent of the opioid overdose survivors were connected with a chemical dependency professional through Clallam County’s syringe exchange, public health intern Josh Edmondson said.
“This doesn’t necessarily mean that they have gone on and received full treatment, but we have made that first step in getting them into contact with the dependency professional,” said Edmondson, who analyzed the opioid overdose data.
Where and who
About 56 percent of this year’s reported overdoses happened in the Port Angeles area, Edmondson said.
About 20 percent occurred in Forks, 15 percent happened in Sequim, 2 percent occurred in Neah Bay and 7 percent happened in unknown locations.
The age of those who experienced an overdoses varied widely.
“It’s not isolated to, say, young people,” Edmondson said.
“It’s very well distributed amongst younger and middle age, getting up into 50s,” Josh said.
The overdose reporting program covers heroin, methadone, hydrocodone (Vicodin), oxycodone (Percocet or OxyContin), fentanyl, buprenorphine and morphine.
The county Health Department has been distributing naloxone since July 2015 through its syringe exchange program.
Port Angeles police officers, who are often the first to respond to overdose emergency calls, have been administering the antidote to patients through a separate pilot program since March 2015.
“It will be probably difficult to know for a little while how much (naloxone) is decreasing the death rate, but anecdotally we know the naloxone that has been both granted to us, gifted to us and paid for by the county, all those things helped,” Frank told the health board.
The emergency departments at Olympic Medical Center and Forks Community Hospital played a “critical role in getting this effort off the ground,” Frank said.
When an overdose involves prescription pills, the health department contacts the prescriber to assess the patient’s treatment plan.
Evidence suggests that long-term opioid use increases the risk of an overdose, health officials said.
“The reporting is a valuable component of our overall response to the opioid overdose epidemic and helps guide our other efforts including improving prescribing practices, expanding access to treatment and using naloxone to decrease the risk of fatal overdoses.”
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Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 56450, or at rollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
Reporter Jesse Major contributed to this story from Port Townsend.
