RECIFE, Brazil – As scientists have tried to solve the medical mystery behind the surge of babies being born with devastating birth defects in Brazil, they’ve pieced together evidence that the mosquito-borne Zika virus may be to blame. But in northeast Brazil, many residents have fashioned a rival theory: That the defects are caused by […]
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As heroin and opioid abuse has spiked in the last few years, conversations about addiction have moved out of the shadows. On Tuesday, in Chasing Heroin, FRONTLINE goes inside the worst drug epidemic in U.S. history, tracing the lives of addicts, investigating Big Pharma’s unprecedented push to popularize opioid painkillers, and examining radical new approaches […]
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The nation’s opioid epidemic has come up repeatedly in the 2016 race for the White House, and for good reason. In 2014 alone, more Americans died of a drug overdose than in any other year on record. Nearly half of those deaths – around 29,000 – involved some type of opioid — like heroin. The […]
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RECIFE, Brazil — One evening last March, infectious disease specialist Dr. Carlos Brito picked up his phone and sent a message to a group of his colleagues. He’d been seeing patients with a rash, swollen joints, and a slight fever – symptoms that were similar to the dengue outbreak he had recently been treating, but […]
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FILE – This Oct. 14, 2015, file photo, shows the Food & Drug Administration campus in Silver Spring, Md. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik,…
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The Options and Obstacles to Treating Heroin Addiction
by PBS June 8, 2016Five years ago, 6 percent of the people who entered the Staten Island YMCA’s substance abuse treatment program were addicted to heroin. Today, it’s 30 percent. “The largest percentage of people that come to us, the substance that they’re most often using is heroin,” says the program’s executive director, Jacqueline Filis. “It was a slow […]
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The opioid epidemic has been called the worst drug crisis in American history. Death rates now rival those of AIDS during the 1990s, and with overdoses from heroin and other opioids now killing more than 27,000 people a year, the crisis has led to urgent calls for action. The epidemic didn’t happen overnight. Over the course […]
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Most of the media attention in the current nationwide heroin epidemic has focused on the uptick in overdose deaths among suburban, white, middle-class users — many of whom turned to the drug after experimenting with prescription painkillers. And it’s among whites where the most dramatic effect has been seen — a rise of more than […]