opioid

Students, faculty and staff worked alongside Operation Giving Relief to Area Children for Enrichment (GRACE) to collect and donate approximately 68 outfits for the Juvenile Court’s Family Unification and Recovery Program in Scioto County.

Donations included pants, shirts, socks, underwear and winter coats. 

Public Health Student Leadership Council president and third-year environmental public health student Elli Schwartz launched the clothing drive in 2018 in response to opioid-related research by epidemiology chair William Miller, MD, PhD, MPH.

A study conducted by researchers with The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians shows a significant increase in EMS administration of naloxone during a recent five-year period. Naloxone is a life-saving drug that can quickly reverse the effects of an opioid overdose.

The hill is steep in the battle against opioids. Drug overdose deaths in the U.S. climbed 21 percent in 2016 from the year before, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and nearly two-thirds of those deaths involved prescription or illicit opioids.

Leslie Dawn Cooper struggled with addiction for years until her untimely death in 2009. The Portsmouth, Ohio, resident overdosed on oxycodone at the age of 34. If someone else was present at the time of her death, a witness intervention could have saved Cooper’s life.

Teams of students from The Ohio State University College of Public Health presented strategies for reducing the burden of opioid misuse and opioid-related deaths in Hocking County, Ohio, to county health officials in the inaugural CPH Student Case Competition on Wednesday.

The competition, organized and hosted by the College of Public Health Alumni Society, challenged teams of undergraduate and graduate students to spend two weeks developing population health intervention strategies based on the county’s community health assessment data, and existing resources and programming.

When Ohio Governor John Kasich passed through the sunlit atrium of the Ohio Statehouse one morning in early April, he noticed a meeting taking place with an all too familiar theme.

It was two days after Kasich gave his State of the State address in Sandusky, Ohio, where he discussed, among other needs, the opioid epidemic that has been ravaging his state. So when he stumbled upon a room full of education, health and government leaders discussing opiate abuse in Ohio, he seized the opportunity.