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 the youngest victims of the epidemic — babies born to a mother who uses opioids who then go through withdrawal themselves. In rural areas, nearly 8 in 1,000 babies suffer from neonatal abstinence syndrome, which can include trembling, excessive crying and intestinal troubles. Pediatrician Nicole Villapiano describes these babies as “miserable.” Then in “The opioid epidemic spurs a search for new, safer painkillers”, Laurel Hamers investigates efforts to find new pain-killing drugs. Opioids bring scary side effects and the risk of addiction, but for some people, they are still the best option to alleviate excruciating pain.