Some topics call for science reporting from many angles

I’m warning you up front. There’s heartbreak in this issue. In two stories, Science News writers investigate new facets of the ongoing opioid epidemic in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 91 Americans die on average each day from opioid overdoses, quadruple the deaths from opioid overdoses in 1999. Today, nearly half of those deaths involve prescription painkillers. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this. Certainly not in modern times,” Robert Anderson, chief of mortality statistics at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, told the Associated Press late last year.

In the first story, “For babies exposed to opioids in the womb, parents may be the best medicine,” Meghan Rosen writes about