"Health & Medical News"

A hardscrabble region where employment is often limited to working the mines or working in prisons, Appalachia also has become home to some of the nation’s worst addiction problems, the Washington Post reported Jan. 13.

OxyContin first appeared as a drug of abuse in the region almost a decade ago, but experts say prescription-drug abuse is worse now than ever. In western Virginia, for example, 248 people died of overdoses in 2006, a 270-percent increase from a decade earlier.

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A “substantially growing number of patients” are being injured or killed by the prescription drugs they are taking under doctors’ orders, according to a new report from the Institute for Safe Medication Practices.

Reuters reported Sept. 10 that researcher Thomas Moore and colleagues said that reports of such deaths and injuries have more than doubled between 1998 and 2005, largely due to problems with painkillers and immune-system boosters.

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