CDC: Time for all EMS staff to employ overdose-reversal drug

A kit with naloxone, also known by its brand name Narcan, is displayed at the South Jersey AIDS Alliance in Atlantic City, N.J., on Feb. 19, 2014. An overdose of opiates essentially makes the body forget to breathe. Naloxone works … A kit with naloxone, also known … more >

By Tom Howell Jr. - The Washington Times - Friday, April 24, 2015

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday urged emergency response agencies to make sure all of their staff members know how to use an overdose-reversal treatment that can prevent deaths from prescription opioid or heroin use.

Officials say all 50 states allow advanced EMS staff to administer the treatment, known as naloxone, yet as of 2014 only a dozen states allowed basic-level staff to administer it as an injection.

Administration officials said all responders should be ready to use it, as it also comes in a nasal spray form.

Rural EMS squads should be the most aggressive in their training, they added. While the rate of opioid-overdose death was 45 percent higher in rural areas than in urban ones for 2012, the rate of naloxone use by EMS staff was only 22.5 percent higher in rural areas.

“Having trained EMS staff to administer naloxone in rural areas will save lives,” CDC Director Tom Frieden said.

Congressional lawmakers are increasingly sounding the alarm over opioid abuse, and Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell has repeatedly pointed to the fight as a key priority of her tenure.

On Thursday, she told Senate appropriators to free up funding that would help states provide naloxone to police and emergency responders.

President Obama’s fiscal 2016 budget request had included more than $100 million to combat prescription opioid and heroin abuse, citing research that links 20,000 deaths per year to prescription opioid and heroin use.

Although some critics say naloxone might dissuade opioid users from seeking treatment, government studies have cast doubt on those concerns, and state legislatures are considering laws that would free up access to the treatment.

Earlier this week, state lawmakers in Delaware advanced a plan that would make naloxone available to nurses in public schools.

On the federal level, Sen. Rob Portman, Ohio Republican, and Sheldon Whitehouse, Rhode Island Democrat, introduced a comprehensive anti-addiction bill that would, in part, create grants to help states train law enforcement in the use of naloxone.

• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.