READING EAGLE / AP: …Rural overdose deaths increased from about one per 100,000 residents to 13 per 100,000, according to the report by the Center for Rural Pennsylvania. Urban fatalities rose from about three to 16 per 100,000 residents, the study found.
A drug called naloxone, commonly referred to by the brand name Narcan, reverses the effects of heroin and opioids like oxycodone. Although Pennsylvania permits paramedics and doctors to use it, police were not able to legally administer the antidote until now…
Administered as a nasal spray or injection, naloxone works by blocking receptors in the brain that opiates latch onto. Police in the Boston suburb of Quincy, Massachusetts, have carried the nasal spray since 2010 and said in July 2013 that they used naloxone 179 times, reversing 170 overdoses — a 95 percent success rate… (more)
WIKPEDIA: Naloxone is a pure opioid antagonist[1] developed by Sankyo in the 1960s.[2][3] Unlike other opioid receptor antagonists it has no concomitant agonist properties. Naloxone is a drugused to counter the effects of opioid overdose, such as heroin or morphine specifically the life-threatening depression of the central nervous system, respiratory system, and hypotension secondary to opiate overdose. Naloxone is also experimentally used in the treatment for congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (CIPA), an extremely rare disorder (1 in 125 million) that renders one unable to feel pain, or differentiate temperatures. It is marketed under various trademarks including Narcan, Nalone, Evzio and Narcanti, and has sometimes been mistakenly called “naltrexate”. It is not to be confused withnaltrexone, an opioid receptor antagonist with qualitatively different effects, used for dependence treatment rather than emergency overdose treatment. It is also combined withbuprenorphine in a drug called Suboxone which is used to treat opioid addiction. [4]
It is on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines, a list of the most important medication needed in a basic health system.[5]
In most developed countries naloxone is required to be present whenever opiates or opioids are administered intravenously to combat accidental overdose.
