(Radio Iowa) – A young child was accidentally shot with a handgun in Storm Lake. Authorities were called to a Storm Lake residence around 7:30 Wednesday evening. A nine-year-old child had received a lower body gunshot wound. Police determined that another child in the home located an unsecured handgun and unintentionally discharged it, and it struck the nine-year-old. The nine-year-old was transported by ambulance to the hospital in Storm Lake for non-life threatening injuries. The incident remains under investigation.

(Radio Iowa) – A couple of Iowa health experts say the increase in opioid deaths in the state is alarming — but they are confident things can turn around. University of Iowa professor of psychiatry and emergency medicine, Gerard Clancy says nearly 30 percent of their clinic and emergency room visits are now related to psychiatric and addiction needs. “There is an evolving epidemic within the pandemic — and that’s an epidemic of both mental disorders and substance use disorders. In part, dealing with the stress of the pandemic, but in part, because the treatment system has struggled with the weight of the pandemic as well,” Clancy says.

Clancy says one of the problems is opioids are now laced with highly-potent fentanyl. “The insurgent of fentanyl has made things much more complicated,” according to Clancy. “It’s important for people to understand that fentanyl is a different player. It is more dangerous. It is harder to work with as far as some of the treatment tools that we have.” But he says he is confident they can make progress and says mental and substance use disorders are treatable conditions, and he urges Iowans who are struggling to seek help. Alison Lynch is the director of the opioid addiction clinic at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. She says fentanyl is a serious issue.

“It’s made it much hard to resuscitate somebody if they do have an overdose. In the past, if someone had a heroin overdose we could use Narcan — and often one dose or maybe a couple of doses would work, ” she says. “And now that fentanyl is in the drug supply — it can take multiple doses of Narcan….and even then it can be really hard to get somebody out of that overdose,” Lynch says. But she says there are treatment options, and she encourages Iowans who are struggling to seek help.

“I can’t tell you how many success stories we have in our clinic. We have so many people who arrived and their substance abuse or their opioid use have become kind of chaotic and things have really gotten to a crisis point — and then they get started in treatment — and really quickly we can see a lot of progress,” she says. “They start feeling better and they are able to focus on setting some goals for themselves and really make a lot of progress pretty quickly in getting into recovery.”

The Iowa Department of Public Health estimates that fentanyl deaths rose from 31 percent of all overdoses in 2016 to 87 percent in 2021. The two spoke during an update on the opioid epidemic Thursday by Attorney General Tom Miller.

(Radio Iowa) – Advocates in Iowa are stunned over the decision by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or C-M-S, to deny coverage for an entire class of drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease. Lauren Livingston, spokeswoman for the Iowa Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association, says the blanket decision has tremendous implications beyond the initial drug, Aduhelm. “They will require people who want to try out these treatments in the future to have to go through a clinical trial in order to receive the treatment,” Livingston says, “and the main problem is, this really restricts access to the majority of people.”

The draft decision says all future F-D-A-approved treatments in this class of drugs, regardless of clinical trial results and what the F-D-A recommends, will -not- be covered except in another clinical trial. “They’ve never made a decision to cover an entire class of drugs based on just one drug,” Livingston says, “and many people aren’t even near an institution that does clinical trials, so it makes it really hard for people to get access to these treatments.”

Aduhelm is showing promise in the treatment of early-stage Alzheimer’s and for others with mild cognitive impairment. For C-M-S to deny coverage, Livingston says, is putting concerns about money over the lives of patients.  “Biogen, the drug maker, originally had it priced at $56,000,” Livingston says. “They did get a lot of pushback from the Alzheimer’s Association and many others and they did cut the price to $28,000 a year, but that’s still far too expensive for the majority of people to be able to afford out-of-pocket without coverage.”

Many other drugs used in treating other afflictions are quite expensive and -are- covered by C-M-S, she notes. A statement from the national association’s CEO says: “People living with Alzheimer’s disease deserve the same access to therapies given to those living with other conditions like cancer, heart disease and HIV/AIDS. For those in the Administration to treat those with Alzheimer’s disease differently than those with other diseases is simply unacceptable.” About six-million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s, including some 66-thousand Iowans.