Excerpts from the Gonsalves interview posted yesterday

Community based opioid initiatives

What policy changes would slow the death rate?

We know what to do about opioids. Dayton, Ohio, used to have one of the worst overdose rates the country. They cut it in half. How? They did it by providing naloxone to first responders, which reduced overdose fatalities. They did it by having a clean-needle program, so that drug users stopped sharing needles. They did expanding access to methadone to treat addiction.

By contrast, Scott County in Southern Indiana is a place where the state authorities failed to act decisively. In 2008, public health officials began to discern the first signs of opioid abuse. By 2015, they had 215 cases of H.I.V. in Scott County.

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My colleague Forrest Crawford and I wondered if this could have been prevented. The C.D.C. had data showing when individuals in Scott County were infected and who their contacts were. Using that, we made a computer simulation where one can, essentially, run the epidemic back in time and see what might have been.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/health/gonsalves-aids-actup-epidemiology.html