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By WENDY STIVER
LOCK HAVEN – Heroin and similar drugs kill seven people in our state every day.
The Pennsylvania Physician General brought that alarming statistic and more to her talk Tuesday at Lock Haven University on drug abuse, the importance of childhood vaccines, and other health issues.
As a well-known transgender woman, she also touched on LGBT health issues.
Around 25 students and faculty members heard Rachel L. Levine, M.D. speak in the Greenberg Auditorium of the Willis Health Professions Center.
An excellent speaker, Levine reached out to engage her listeners and asked questions throughout her presentation to spark a dialogue.
“I’ll bet you that you know someone who abuses drugs. Almost everybody knows someone,” she said. “You may not even know that they do it, but you know them.”
The ebola outbreak in 2014 saw two deaths and fewer than 10 cases in the United States, yet it stimulated a massive response from the American media. Deaths from opioid drug abuse far outnumber those from ebola in America, Levine said, but the media coverage is very different.
Heroin is a well-known opioid, and other opioids are found in prescription medications including fentanyl, Vicodin, oxycodone. Today’s problems stem from two roots: a wide highway of heroin flowing into the United States and the development of new pain medications that doctors tend to over-prescribe, Levine said.
The state Department of Health is responding to this crisis, she said, by educating providers and the public and promoting the use of the life-saving medication naloxone (Suboxone) in overdose emergencies.
And, she announced, there will be a prescription drug monitoring program as part of the attempt to stem the tide of drug abuse. When a prescription is written and filled, that information will go into a central database, she said.
She is working to make naloxone more readily available to friends and relatives of drug abusers or addicts, and she urged her listeners to look into it and consider keeping it on hand.
Naloxone essentially reverses the effects of an overdose. It does not cause a high, Levine said, and it saves lives. It is available as a nasal spray or in an auto-injector similar to an EpiPen, and most insurances cover it, she said.
Naloxone is not a new drug, but the push for having it available is.
Levine said her plan is to write a prescription that would be honored statewide so that individuals “could go into a drug store and say, ‘I want naloxone on Dr. Levine’s prescription’.”
The physician general also credited LHU professor Dr. Beth F. McMahon for her work with Project Bald Eagle, a public health model responding to the epidemic of prescription drug and heroin abuse.
This abuse, Levine said, is “the biggest health crisis” in the state and probably in the nation.
Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Dr. Karen Murphy has established several priorities, Levine said, and drug abuse is among them.
Levine said she spends about two-thirds of her time as physician general working, in cooperation with other agencies, on preventing deaths from this epidemic.
Appointed by Gov. Tom Wolf to be physician general, Levine is a professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center where she has served as chief of the Division of Adolescent Medicine and Eating Disorders, a program she created. She has also worked actively with the school’s Office of Diversity, mentoring LGBT students, faculty and staff.
She wants to see medical and behavioral health sciences – mind and body, as she explained it – integrated so that both can be addressed at the average medical clinic. If mental health providers can be “embedded” in clinics, patients can find “one-stop shopping” of a sort, and health care overall will be improved, she said. Pennsylvania will have a quantifiable plan to do that in the next four years, she said.
She is passionate about the importance of health issues faced by young adults, including eating disorders.
The Department of Health is also trying to encourage health providers to become more familiar with transgender health issues, she said. There are experienced providers in Harrisburg, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, she said, but “not so much in between.”
Dr. Rick W. Schulze, professor in the LHU Department of Health Sciences and chair of the university’s LGBTQ Commission, introduced Levine. During the program, he asked her how people view her first – as a celebrity transgender woman or as the physician general. Levine said she hoped her appointment as the first transgender person in the Pennsylvania cabinet has created an opening for LGBT persons to be seen as professionals and not as members of a minority.
Mentioning that her mother was the only woman graduate in the Boston Law School Class of 1946, Levine talked about gender roles as well as gender orientation and gender identification.
On college campuses, she said, it is not uncommon for people to reject a strictly binary view of sexual orientation. She suggested that it is best not to make assumptions about gender or sexuality before getting to know the person.
Levine said “health disparities” do exist in Pennsylvania, between the poor and the well off, between rural and urban Pennsylvanians. New information also shows that LGBT Pennsylvanians are more likely to smoke cigarettes and be obese than others, and are less likely to get regular cancer screenings.
She urged the Lock Haven students to get the flu vaccine, as well as the HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccine.
“The flu shots we give are very safe and effective,” she said. “You are not going to get sick from the vaccine. It’s very rare.”
The report of a link between the measles vaccine and autism caused concern over vaccines in general. The data the report cited turned out to be completely fabricated, Levine said. Since then, a half-dozen actual studies have shown no link at all, she said.
Measles is a serious disease, and there has been an uptick in the number of cases due to concerns about the vaccine, she said.
In 2013, data showed that only 85 percent of kindergartners in Pennsylvania had their full two measles, mumps and rubella vaccinations.
To remedy this sad statistic, the Department of Health is cooperating with the Department of Education and encouraging parents to get the vaccines in the spring or the summer before the child starts school. “Don’t wait, vaccinate,” is the campaign slogan, Levine said.
The state allows eight months from the day the child starts kindergarten until he must have his vaccinations, which is a large part of the problem. This regulation is three or four decades old, Levine said, and the Department of Health has started the process to change the provisional period from eight months to four days.
The department is also encouraging Pennsylvanians to prevent Lyme disease. This campaign’s slogan is “Don’t let a tick make you sick.”
Pennsylvania has the largest number of new Lyme disease cases in the country, the physician general said.
More information on heroin abuse and naloxone, measles vaccines, Lyme disease prevention and other health issues is available at www.health.pa.gov.