(Mirror Daily, United States) – According to the Health Officer at the County Public of Sacramento, there is a new overdose wave in Sacramento that has already killed five people and hospitalized an additional fifteen in only a week.

Olivia Kasiyre, the Health Officer at the County Public of Sacramento, declared in a news release that a new drug, fentanyl, is wreaking havoc among the inhabitants of the county.

According to Kasiyre, there were five deaths last week related to the new painkiller and fifteen more people are being currently hospitalized for an overdose.

She continues her official statement saying that the investigators believe that the affected patients either bought the narcotic substance off the street, or they got it from neighbors, friends or family members.

The cases are from both South and North Sacramento so the area on which the drug spread is pretty large.

Furthermore, Kasiyre stated that in at least a number of cases the fentanyl pill was contaminated. The officials that are running the investigation are not sure about the form in which the drug is being spread among the people that are consuming it.

The last official information that Kasiyre gave was the fact that doctors believe that the affected individuals took one or two tablets. The quantity was enough to cause an overdose that hospitalized fifteen people and killed five more.

At the end of her public statement, the health officer warns all Sacramento citizens to stay away from the tablets due to their volatility and danger risk.

But fentanyl is not a new drug. The opioid based analgesic was fist created in 1959 as a pain management solution. But the analgesic is believed to be thirty times more potent than heroin.

Lately recreational users started taking the potent analgesic, and the results are devastating. Sacramento is not the only town that has been hit by a wave of overdosed patients.

In Ohio, at least, twenty-two people died after taking a tablet of fentanyl this month. And according to the emergency department director at Cleveland’s St. Vincent Medical Center, Carla O’Day, the overdoses are not only boosting in numbers but also in severity.

The surprise came after the CDC managed to put together all of the information it collected about the new overdose wave in Sacramento, Ohio and Cleveland and it discovered that the average users are far from the usual stereotype.

It seems that educated, white, suburban men are falling prey to the dangers of fentanyl.

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