Infants Born Addicted to Opiates Tripled in Past Decade

[xchrom]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-30/infants-born-addicted-to-opiates-tripled-in-past-decade.html

The number of babies born dependent on prescription painkillers like Oxycontin tripled in the last decade along with higher costs to treat their withdrawal symptoms, research showed.

The surge in newborns with withdrawal symptoms from 2000 to 2009 was accompanied by a five-fold increase in the number of mothers using the opiate drugs during pregnancy, according to a study today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The average hospital bill to treat the babies jumped 35 percent to $53,400 in the same period, the research found.

Sales of opiate painkillers such as Oxycontin and Vicodin increased four-fold during the decade, according to the study. The findings are a call for greater effort to limit the drugs’ abuse, said Stephen Patrick, the study’s lead author. One baby born every hour in the U.S. is addicted to the drugs, according to the study, the first to look at the number of infants born with opiate withdrawal.

“There’s a rapid rise in newborns with signs of withdrawal that demands attention from a public health perspective,” said Patrick, a fellow at the University of Michigan’s Division of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine in Ann Arbor, in an April 27 telephone interview. “We really need to think of, as a country, the way we use opiate pain medicines and limit their abuse when possible.”

The study is also being presented today at the Pediatric Academic Societies Annual Meeting in Boston.

[Warpy]

1. So the neonatologists will scream

and they'll tighten things up to where they leave people in pain and facing suicide as the only alternative, and the babies will be born addicted to black tar heroin instead.

The only answer to this is prenatal testing and trying to taper the drugs down before the kid is born.

Babies born drug addicted are painful as hell to watch. However, long term studies have shown absolutely no problems later in life after the rough start.

[hedgehog]

2. I think there is a serious level of prescription medication abuse in

certain regions of this country. At the very least, as you point out, there should be good pre-natal care to identify these situations. Judicial interference should eb completely off the table.