Opiate Addiction: Rural US Babies Are The Victims Of The Problem

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It is very heartbreaking that little babies of US are the victims of opiate addiction. The effects of drugs withdrawal are huge among babies and they are getting born addicted to opioids. Saddest point is the number is increasing day by day. Now it has become a big social headache.

According to a new study rural infants are at more risk than the city. Researchers are saying that they are more concerned about neonatal abstinence syndrome, a very serious problem which develops in a baby's body before birth due to taking drugs during pregnancy.

The number of sufferers with neonatal abstinence syndrome is more in babies in rural areas in the US. It has increased from 1.2 cases per 1000 hospital births in 2004 to 7.5 cases per 1000 births in2013 which has become the reason tension for everyone. The number is lesser in the city compared to rural areas which are a little hope in the complete darkness.

According to the sources of Reuters, Mr.Villapiano, famous paediatrics researcher, said, "Prior to our study, we had limited data from a few states like West Virginia and Tennessee that showed rising rates of neonatal abstinence syndrome in some rural counties." He also added, "What we didn't know was how the opioid crisis has affected rural moms and their infants across the country."

Reports of Centres for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC showed a result at the beginning of this year. According to that report neonatal syndrome has been a major social issue since 1999. The number was 1.5 babies for every 1,000 births at that time.

CDC did study in 2013 in many states and they got different results in different states. They found 0.7 cases per 1000 births in Hawaii where in West Virginia the result was 33.4 cases per 1000 births.

Researchers collected all the data of national hospitals records recently and they found 4,192 rural and 19,752 urban babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome.

According to JAMA Paediatrics victims of neonatal abstinence syndrome has increased 13 percent to 21 percent in rural sides. Apart from this maternal opioid use has increased from 1.3 to 8.1 cases per 1,000 hospitals among rural mothers where the number among urban mothers is 1.6 to 4.8 per 1,000 hospital deliveries.

Numbers of victims are increasing due to unawareness. Awareness among pregnant women is really very important.

According to Brown "If state health authorities will acknowledge the lack of treatment access and how this leads to them footing the bill for these babies, it may lead them to improve access to treatment clinics in rural areas,".

At present, the ultimate aim is to know how the babies can get rid of the opiate addiction. Honestly babies of the present day are the key parts of the future development of society.