Hacker News Reader

Comment by dizhn | Hacker News Reader

The phrase "leading cause of death" has circular reference there. Each article is pointing to the other. I wanted to see where they got that figure. At the bottom of the current article it says "in a provisional tally seven months ago, [The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] calculated the overall number of drug overdoses at 107,622. Two-thirds were due to fentanyl."

So fentanyl is the drug most people overdose on, or is it killing more people than heart diseases, traffic accidents, etc do?

View on HN

It's not laid out explicitly, but you can see the numbers here and pull the 2 textual representations to get the detail:

"Top Ten Leading Causes of Death in the U.S. for Ages 1-44"

https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/animated-leading-causes.h...

"Unintentional Injury" holds overdoses, which are called "unintentional poisoning" in the breakdown in the bottom chart.

For 2020:

  80,208 Unintentional Injury deaths
    (consisting of)
    49,643 Unintentional Poisoning deaths <-- overdoses, 2/3 fentanyl
    21,780 Unintentional MV Traffic deaths
     2,232 Unintentional Drowning deaths
     1,176 Unintentional Fall deaths
     5,377 All Other Unintentional deaths
  22,431 Suicide deaths
  18,838 Homicide deaths
  17,310 Heart Disease deaths
  16,708 Heart Disease deaths
   8,902 COVID-19 deaths
   6,620 Liver Disease deaths
   4,445 Diabetes deaths
   2,927 Stroke deaths
   2,100 Influenza & Pneumonia deaths

For anyone else wondering, one of the two "Heart Disease deaths" is "Malignant Cancer deaths", but mislabeled. Inferred from the years before 2020.

Following your limk it appears to me that only 46.6% [1], or 23132 deaths, of the unintentional poisoning deaths are classified as X42, or “Accidental poisoning by and exposure to narcotics and psychodysleptics [hallucinogens], not elsewhere classified” [2]. I can”t find any further split into fentanyl and non-fentanyl among those.

[1] https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/lcd/drill-down?lcd=eyJjYXVzZXMi...

[2] https://icd.who.int/browse10/2015/en#!/X40-X49

It is surprisingly hard to get the actual data for fentanyl/opioid overdoses, even though the numbers are on the CDC site, just spread out in multiple places.

I'm not usually into conspiracy theories, but it has the flavor of "bury this without outright lying".

You suspect the CDC would massage their messaging to manipulate (nudge?) public opinion towards achieving a desired outcome, rather than just straightforward factual scientific reporting the likes of which most people would expect?

Hard to speculate on motivation, but it's very odd that the information is arranged in a way that makes it very difficult to figure out "overdoses are the #1 killer of people aged 1-44".

Is there any reason to believe this has been changed from the 5 years or so ago when overdoses were not the #1 killer?

So it really is a huge number, and along with other overdoses it is even bigger. This is mind blowing stuff.

All these links are wapo internal. I can't find the CDC corroborating this.

It looks like the authors are comparing numbers from different methodologies and then claiming a quantitative rank order can be deduced and it can't unless you can demonstrate the methodologies yield equivalencies especially when you're looking at small population percentages...

I had a good friend lose a multi-year battle with opioids about 7 years ago who ended up sleeping on my couch for months when his family had abandoned him. It's a life changing and terrible thing and I've never been through anything more difficult than helping someone struggling with opioids but I don't think these claims in the article are well supported.

I wish nothing but the best for others going through these troubles. I wish compassion worked as better medicine

> So fentanyl is the drug most people overdose on, or is it killing more people than heart diseases, traffic accidents, etc do?

The numbers for other types of fatalities are available so you could do a quick comparison:

42,000 motor vehicle fatalities in the US for 2021 (all ages), so way above that

Heart disease is more unclear, I mostly found age-adjusted risks/etc. It looks like at best I could find, around ~400,000 americans in that age group have heart attacks (eg. MI) each year, though the death rate is obviously going to be lower than that.

So, it's definitely possible. IIRC "death by misadventure" and the like are super high on the list of causes of death for young people (18-25), so very possible fentanyl is way up there if not at the top.

Here is a Snopes article from a year ago that claims to have duplicated the Fox News article using CDC data:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fentanyl-overdose-death/

Interesting that Google searches for this info return RT results

Oh great find! I didn't see that in my search results but might've just had the wrong keywords.

Yeah, I'm not surprised - motor vehicle accidents were always super high on the list for that demographic so if fentanyl is even remotely close to the number reported above it would easily surpass everything else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com