Public Health

More than 70 percent of Americans don't want prescription medication for pain treatment, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday.

HHS and the Department of Defense have begun search and rescue efforts to evacuate dialysis patients from St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, to San Juan, Puerto Rico, due to damage left in the wake of Hurricane Irma.

Opioid use may be attributable to 20 percent of the overall decline in men's participation in the U.S. workforce, according to a paper authored by Alan Krueger, PhD, an economics professor at Princeton (N.J.) University.

Vox recently featured Atul Gawande, MD, a public health researcher, author and endocrinologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, on its podcast, "The Weeds," to discuss the physician's role in the opioid epidemic, among other topics.

The number of heroin users in the U.S. increased by 135 percent from 2002 through 2016, according to a federal report published by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Sept. 7.

The number of uninsured Americans could increase by 9.4 million if the federal government stops funding cost-sharing reductions, which help insurers offset the cost of offering eligible ACA health plan enrollees lower deductibles, copayments, coinsurance and out-of-pocket maximums, according to…

Republican Governor Bruce Rauner signed an executive order Wednesday to create an opioid overdose prevention and intervention task force in Illinois.

The CDC is allocating $28.6 million in funds to 44 states and Washington, D.C., to support local responses to the nation's opioid epidemic.

Twenty Alaskans have died of fentanyl-related drug overdoses so far in 2017, compared to just eight such deaths for all of 2016, according to KTVF.

Baptist Beaumont (Texas) Hospital airlifted about 200 patients to neighboring facilities during an evacuation Thursday after flooding shut off hospital access to clean water, according to Fox News Health.