CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Health officials now have an improved understanding of the number and characteristics of people illegally injecting drugs in Cabell County thanks to a research collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Starting this week, the methods used to collect that information were being rolled out for use to other rural communities across the United States.
“This is an epidemic and to fight an epidemic you have to know the population, you have to know the disease and you have to get your information and act on it,” said Dr. Michael Kilkenny, physician-director for the Cabell-Huntington Health Department.
A study published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health found 1,857 people used drugs intravenously in the last six months in Cabell County which has a total population of 94,958.
The Bloomberg American Health Initiative funded the project which put researchers from Johns Hopkins on the ground in Huntington and in surrounding areas.
For that study, those using were surveyed about their drug use and needs for public health services like resources for overdose prevention and drug treatment offered through the Cabell-Huntington Health Department’s Harm Reduction Program.
In addition to scope, researchers determined that most people who inject drugs in Cabell County are white, 83.4 percent, male, 59.5 percent, and under the age of 40, 70.9 percent.
A total of 82 percent reported injecting heroin, while 71 percent said they had used crystal methamphetamine in the past six months. The rate of fentanyl injection was 56.3 percent.
Other communities can now learn from the results, according to Kilkenny.
“They can do this study themselves with reasonable accuracy and define their own populations,” he said. “That’s a pretty remarkable advance for communities suffering from the effects of this epidemic.”
Agreement on that came from Dr. Sean Allen, the lead researcher and an assistant scientist in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Health, Behavior and Society.
“By understanding the size and characteristics of the populations in need, rural communities can tailor response strategies and begin turning the tide on the opioid crisis,” Allen said in a statement.
In 2017, there were 1,831 overdoses reported in Cabell County and 152 claimed lives.
As opioid overdose numbers skyrocketed, Kilkenny said he and other health officials in Cabell County had to rely on usage estimations.
“In communities that are dealing with this for the first time, including myself, the level of expertise is not there. We learn as we go. I’m a lot smarter than I was three years ago,” Kilkenny told MetroNews.
“Previously, we were working on our best guesses using other techniques to estimate what kind of population we had.”
Past projections were made from complication rates like overdose deaths and cases of neonatal abstinence system.
Kilkenny described those estimates as “pretty rough.”
Now, updated academic research techniques have been applied.
“The numbers were actually a little bit lower than we had projected by our guesstimates previously,” he said. “I think that I was a little bit surprised by that, but it’s just really important that we have the best data available.”
Along with Dr. Allen and Dr. Kilkenny, the other authors of the report, “Estimating the Number of People Who Inject Drugs in a Rural County in Appalachia,” were Allison O’Rourke, Rebecca Hamilton White, Kristin Schneider and Susan Sherman.