FLATWOODS, W.Va. — The Executive Director of the Harrison-Clarksburg Health Department said there’s mostly bad news—although some good news–regarding the opioid epidemic in West Virginia and how it relates to the rest of the country.
“Unfortunately in Harrison County, we have higher data showing us in the southern coal belt,” Joseph C. Bundy, formerly the President of the West Virginia Association of Local Health Departments, said Thursday. “In the southern counties, they have a bigger issue. Unfortunately, in Harrison County, a lot of these maps will show Harrison County’s in darker red just like some of these other counties.”
Bundy said one of the issues that makes Harrison County look more like one of West Virginia’s southern counties in terms of opioid abuse is it’s inclusion in the I-79 corridor.
“I think it’s several issues,” he said. “I think it’s definitely a trafficking issue, which we have had for many, many years. And it continues. That’s why we’re taking a quick look at this thing.”
Bundy was attending Thursday’s monthly West Virginia Association of Local Health Departments meeting in Flatwoods, which featured a higher-than-normal volume of local, state, and out-of-state speakers to discuss the opioid epidemic and the process of “harm reduction.”
“Harm reduction is a program in which a community undertakes to do everything they possibly can to help the person that is using drugs intravenously to reduce harm in their life,” he said.
The programs will differ from county-to-county and region-to-region, but Bundy said there was an overarching theme for each program: find a way to reduce the harm drug users incur on their health.
“First thing you do is assess your community and you see what your needs are,” he said. “And you develop harm reduction according to those needs. So, each one of these programs is different in a little bit of a certain way.”
That’s vital now more than ever, according to Bundy.
“We have a disease problem now that is a symptom of intravenous drug use,” he said. “That’s Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, and HIV rates starting to soar in Harrison County for the first time. The Health Department has to put a stop to that. It’s our job. Put a stop to that.”
And, he warned, other hard hit areas in the country could use West Virginia’s crisis to foreshadow what’s next in their own backyards.
“Nationally, that’s going to occur,” Bundy said. “So, there’s really nothing nationally more important than this. All these other states are going to follow us. They are where West Virginia was three or four years ago.”
In a way, Bundy said, that’s also good news. West Virginia’s opioid epidemic has provided a rough blueprint for other states who fear a dangerous transition from prescription pills to heroin, fentanyl, and other opioids could be looming.
“That’s why we are so crowded today,” he said. “We have people from all over the country here today going, ‘We know. We know what’s coming. What are you doing about it?’ And then the negative issue, West Virginia is being seen positively as attacking the issue and trying to put down the crisis.”
Around three years ago, the Bureau of Public Health offered to place Harrison County in their pilot program in dealing with Hepatitis B, which Bundy said had begun to spike unexpectedly. He said the Harrison-Clarksburg Health Department couldn’t originally identify why previously low rates of those diseases were beginning to rise.
“At that particular juncture we didn’t know why,” he said. “Now we do. It’s our intravenous drug use, which is escalating Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, and for the first time we have HIV.”
Drug use comes with an inherently built-in danger, but Bundy said that the increase in rates of viral diseases in Harrison County shows just how extensive damage can be.
“I will quote Dr. [Mike] Brumage from Kanawha-Charleston, who we work closely with,” Bundy said. “He said, ‘The opioid crisis is the biggest public health crisis of our time.'”
Thursday’s meeting ran from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m., featuring speakers in public health from Monongalia, Ohio, and Jefferson counties.
Additionally, Congressman Evan Jenkins (R-WV) and Huntington Mayor Steve Williams joined first responders and members of law enforcement on a packed docket.