BY ERIN KELLY IN KENTUCKY
PUBLISHED 5:00 PM ET JUL. 10, 2023
ELIZABETHTOWN, Ky. — The Lincoln Trail District Health Department shared an alert this month saying that Baptist Health Hardin and Flaget Memorial Hospital in Nelson County reported an unusually high number of nonfatal drug overdoses.
What You Need To Know
Health officials sent out a drug overdose alert after several nonfatal cases were reported in Hardin and Nelson County
The overdoses were reported June 26 – July 3
It’s part of the Kentucky Drug Overdose Alert System
The alert came from the Kentucky Drug Overdose Alert System.
According to the Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center (KIPRC), when a hospital receives overdose patients, data goes into the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE), KIPRC reviews the data, and if a cluster is detected based on certain methodology, the Kentucky Department for Public Health sends out an alert.
“The more law enforcement, harm reduction and first responder partners that we can touch, the better prepared those people can be because they’re the people that are actually responding to and really helping to fight the opioid problem,” said Andrew Farrey, research project manager for KIPRC.
Jennifer Osborne is the harm reduction manager for the Lincoln Trail District Health Department, which serves Hardin, LaRue, Marion, Meade, Nelson and Washington counties.
“It’s important, number one, so that if you have people that are actively using substances, the information can be out there that there’s potentially an increase in possibly batches of drugs that are laced with fentanyl, so that they can be a little bit more alert to what they’re using, change behavior a little bit, whether that is to test the drug for fentanyl, whether that is to make sure that they’re not using alone,” she said.
Osborne said her agency’s role is to get the information out to the public and promote resources like the overdose-reversing drug Narcan, fentanyl test strips and treatment programs, to try to save lives.
The 2022 Overdose Fatality Report shows 2,135 people died from a drug overdose in Kentucky last year.