(NETWORK INDIANA) New state data tool shows how serious the opioid epidemic is in your area
The Indiana State Department of Health has compiled county-by-county “opioid profiles” on its website, showing five years of data on overdoses and H-I-V and hepatitis-C infections. Deputy state health commissioner Pam Pontones says it’ll give local health departments specific information to decide whether to implement needle-exchange programs and other prevention and treatment efforts. And the state will analyze the numbers too to assess where to focus its own prevention programs.
The report shows more than 32-hundred Hoosiers overdosed in 2015 — 274 of them died. The number of O-D’s jumped more than a third in two years. In Morgan, Fayette and Jennings Counties, one in every thousand people overdosed in 2015 — 16 of the overdose deaths were in those counties.
Fayette is one of nine counties which has started a needle exchange program to stop the spread of disease which accompanies opioid use.
Two of the three counties with the worst rates of chronic hepatitis-C are home to two of the state’s three women’s prisons. The third is Scott County, whose off-the-charts H-I-V rates have been linked to intravenous drug use and led to the needle-exchange law. Scott County’s infection rate is six times the state’s second highest, Marion County, and 17 times the state average. The county’s 161 new H-I-V cases rank third behind Marion and Lake Counties, even though the southern Indiana county has a fraction of those counties’ population.
36 of Indiana’s 92 counties have diagnosed at least one H-I-V case since 2011.
Pontones says the numbers aren’t intended as a ranking of counties. She says what’s particularly valuable are trends over time: numbers which have been large and consistent enough for analysts to be confident they’re an accurate reflection of what’s happening in the counties.
