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National opioid strategy called by CAMH experts in Canaada
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National opioid strategy called by CAMH experts in Canaada

India Blooms News Service | | 12 Nov 2016, 07:30 pm
Toronto, Nov. 8 (IBNS): Addiction experts in Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) had been emphasizing the need for a national strategy to control the over prescribing of opioids and to reduce number of deaths in Canada by over dosage of powerful narcotics.

In the year 2015 about 2,000 Canadians died from opioid overdoses. 

Higher number of deaths in 2016 in Canada was expected, said Dr. Benedikt Fischer of the CAMH and co-authors in Monday's edition of the Canadian Medical Association Journal. 

"It's a real public health disaster," Fischer said in an interview with Canadaian Press. "Over the last 10 years, we're looking at somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 dead people in Canada just from opioid overdoses alone." 

The Toronto centre urged Ottawa, in a separate report on Monday to review all prescription painkillers sold in Canada and to pull out from the market all high-dose opioid medications. 

According to a Canadian Press report, in the whole of the world, Canadians are the second-largest consumers after the U.S. of prescription opioids like oxycodone, hydromorphone and fentanyl.
"We have hundreds of thousands of people now who are dependent on these drugs because of misuse or overprescribing or excessive exposure," said Fischer to health authorities. 

Fischer laid the blame on the medical system which allowed physicians to prescribe the drugs for chronic pain.  

According to medical evidences, opioids should be restricted to patients suffering from acute pain, such as that related to cancer or following surgery. 

Opioids should be given in limited doses and for a short duration to prevent dependence and overdose by accident. 

But Fischer said governments had not paid attention on overprescribing.

Instead, as per Fischer, the medical system had increased the access to naloxone. 

Naloxone reverses the overdose effect of an opioid.

The present medical system has also started treating dependency with another medication called suboxone.

Ontario had listed Oxycontin on its provincial drug benefit program.

But this decision shifted the problem to other prescription opioids like morphine and fentanyl patches, said Fischer.

The Ontario government announced in July to remove high-dose opioids from its insurance plan next year, except for palliative care patients. 

Other recommendations in the report, co-authored by Jurgen Rehm of CAMH and Dr. Mark Tyndall of the University of British Columbia, included: following developed guidelines for prescribing opioids with strong scientific evidence in exceptional cases; limiting the dosage prescription and its duration; establishing electronic prescription monitoring systems in Canada to make it obligatory for all physicians and pharmacists to consult before prescribing or dispensing the narcotics.

Fischer also said that illicit fentanyl pills from China and Mexico are being marketed in Canada and have been responsible for numerous overdose deaths, particularly in B.C.

The federal government had announced that a national summit on opioids would be held in Ottawa on November 18.

Addiction experts and organizations such as CAMH would be participating in this, said health authorities.

"There's a very wide range of organizations that need to be involved in order to address the problem from the point of view of prevention and treatment," federal Health Minister Jane Philpott told The Canadian Press at the time of summit's announcement in July.

In a related CMAJ commentary Monday, Drs. M. Eugenia Socias and Keith Ahamad, researchers at the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, said that changing prescribing practices would protect patients in the future.

"However, we're in the middle of an opioid overdose epidemic due to untreated addiction.... We need to act now: Canada can no longer afford to be a witness to this devastating epidemic," write the researchers suggesting that Canada should adopt a plan similar to the National Pain Strategy in the United States.

(Reporting by Asha Bajaj)

 

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