“In 2015, about 90 people in the US died every day from opioid overdoses. If the opioid epidemic continues, the toll could hit more than 250 daily deaths by 2027.
That’s the worst-case scenario laid out in a new analysis by STAT. By asking top public health experts across 10 universities, STAT calculated that the number of people who died from opioid overdoses in one year could rise from 33,000 in 2015 to nearly 94,000 in 2027. That would total more than 650,000 deaths to opioids — not including all other drugs — over the next decade.
“That’s almost as many Americans as will die from breast cancer and prostate cancer during that time period,” Max Blau wrote for STAT. “Put another way, opioids could kill nearly as many Americans in a decade as HIV/AIDS has killed since that epidemic began in the early 1980s.”
In the best-case scenario forecasted by STAT, the number of opioid overdose deaths would drop to more than 21,000 in 2027 — but the figures still get worse before they get better, and still top 300,000 in the next decade.”
Read more at: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/28/15882290/opioid-epidemic-stat-forecast
Source: Vox.com – June 28, 2017
