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| Lawrence County, Indiana (Wikipedia map) |
The Lawrence County Board of Commissioners (following in Madison County's footsteps) voted last week to end the two-year-old program, which provides intravenous drug users with clean syringes and collects used ones to reduce needle sharing that can spread bloodborne diseases like HIV and hepatitis C. The opioid epidemic has led to a rise in hepatitis C, as we reported last week. County health officials wanted to extend the plan, but county prosecutor Michelle Woodward told commissioners she couldn't support facilitating illegal drug use, the Herald-Times in Bloomington reports.
But County Commissioner Rodney Fish said he objected to the law on both moral and practical grounds. Before he cast his vote, NBC News reports that he quoted 2 Chronicles 7:13-14, in which God says that, if he sends a plague among his people, he will "forgive their sin and heal their land" if they turn back to him. Fish told NBC News that his practical objections stemmed from his heavy research with community health professionals, and that "few, if any of the health care professionals that I personally spoke with believe that the needle exchange program was an effective way of getting people into treatment programs." He said he could support a hospital-based program, though.
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Johns Hopkins University, the World Health Organization and former Indiana State Health Commissioner-now U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams, however, back evidence that shows the programs are a proven way to prevent disease," Hedger reports. Christopher Abert of the Indiana Recovery Alliance was more blunt: "People are going to die" without the needle exchange, he told NBC News. The program has contributed to a 50 percent drop in hepatitis C cases in Lawrence County this year, he says, and notes that the grant-funded program costs the county nothing. Getting rid of the needle exchange could trigger long-term costs for the county and its citizens, though. Preventing one case of HIV saves $450,000 in lifetime costs, and preventing one hepatitis C case saves $90,000, he says.
The story is not without historical context in Indiana. As German Lopez of Vox reports, southeastern Indiana suffererd an HIV outbreak in 2015 linked to injected opioids. Then-Gov. Mike Pence was opposed to a needle exchange program at first, but relented after the epidemic worsened.
from The Rural Blog http://ift.tt/2z4en0f Rural Indiana county ends needle exchanges on moral grounds - Entrepreneur Generations
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