Lorraine M. Martin, NSC president and CEO, and Joseph A. Reuter, Stericycle executive vice president and chief people officer, spoke to the media Monday morning to discuss the NSC’s new Opioids at Work Employer Toolkit. The toolkit, which will officially be released on September 18, includes more than two dozen resources for four specific groups found in a typical workplace setting: supervisors, HR professionals, safety professionals and employees.

For the first time in U.S. history, a person is more likely to die from an accidental opioid overdose than from a motor vehicle crash, according to National Safety Council analysis. The odds of dying accidentally from an opioid overdose have risen to one in 96, eclipsing the odds of dying in a motor vehicle crash (one in 103). NSC unveiled the analysis on Injury Facts – the definitive resource for data around unintentional, preventable injuries, commonly known as “accidents.”

Workplaces are not immune to the opioid epidemic in the U.S., which means employers are grappling with ways to manage and react to factors that affect their workforce and its health and productivity.

That the opioid crisis is wreaking havoc on individuals’ lives, tearing families apart and straining municipal emergency response resources is well documented. What is getting less attention is the effects opioid use and misuse may have in the workplace – and the role of work-related injuries in making a person susceptible to opioid addiction.

The rate of alcohol-related visits to U.S. emergency departments (EDs) increased by nearly 50 percent between 2006 and 2014, especially among females and drinkers who are middle-aged or older, according to a new study conducted by National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) researchers.

The average U.S. adult binge drinker consumed 470 alcoholic beverages in 2015, totaling 17 billion drinks, according to a first-of-its-kind study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The study appears in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

While opioid overdose rates remain high among adults, American teens are misusing opioid pain medications less than they did a decade ago. That’s the good news from the 2017 Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey of eighth, 10th and 12th graders in schools nationwide. The bad news? More kids are “vaping” – and they’re not really sure what’s in that mist that they’re inhaling.

Despite a policy that led to a decrease in the amount of prescription opioids dispensed in West Virginia, hospitalizations related to opioids have not significantly declined, according to researchers from West Virginia University. More alarming: the data shows that there was more than a 200 percent increase in heroin poisonings following the policy’s implementation. The study found that overall opioid poisonings rates increased significantly from 2008 to 2015 among all age groups.

President Trump’s declaring the opioid epidemic a national health emergency is a critical first step, but it does not address the urgent need for more federal funds to fight this crisis, according to Arthur C. Evans, Jr., PhD, CEO of the American Psychological Association (APA). Evans said the declaration does not automatically direct federal funds to address the problem – funds which should go to the states, because they “are battling this epidemic on the front lines.”

The fight to protect public health is more important than ever. The Senate is moving quickly — and secretively — on their version of legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act. While we don’t know the content of the bill, we do know that the House-passed repeal bill — the American Health Care Act — would cause over 23 million people to lose their health care, restructure Medicaid, pare down essential benefits like maternity and newborn care, result in the loss of over a million American jobs, and zero out the Prevention and Public Health Fund.