United States: although young men most likely to be the victims where the males made up of 71 percent of the cases and the patients between the ages of 15 and 35 accounted for more than two third of the cases said a team led by CDC researcher Emily Glidden.
These hospital experiences reflect what exactly going on nationwide.
Deadly Consequences
These specific findings are very consistent with a broader trend that has been observed nationally and regionally as well the team wrote in a report published recently in the CDC journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
They noted that by the year 2022, more than half lots of the counterfeit pills seized by the law enforcement were found to contain the potentially lethal levels of fentanyl.
While many users may believe they are buying and consuming legitimate oxycodone pills, “evidence that some persons may purposefully use counterfeit pills with illegally made fentanyl exists,” Glidden’s group noted.
There is already a data which shows that people addicted to the injected heroin might now be consuming fentanyl-laden counterfeit pills to achieve a needle-free high the team explained.
Too often, the consequences of the doing so can be deadly.
CDC team point to the other data showing that deaths are linked to the use of counterfeit pills tripled in the U.S. west between July 2019 and the December of 2021 although such cases are rising nationwide.
Here more than half like its 57 percent of those who died were under the age of 35.
Rising Threat to Teens
As reported by health day, the danger to teens is especially troubling and overdose deaths involving counterfeit pills containing fentanyl “sharply increased across the 31 states between the mid of year 2019 and the late 2021, noted the researchers and this counterfeit pill which are implicated in a quarter of all the teen deaths caused by ODs.