The Washington Post (12/21, Ingraham, 11.19M) reports the opioid epidemic escalated in 2016, “driven by an unprecedented surge in deaths from fentanyl and other synthetic opiates,” according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“More than 42,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses in 2016, a 28 percent increase over 2015,” while “the number of people fatally overdosing on fentanyl and other synthetic opiates more than doubled, from 9,580 in 2015 to 19,413 in 2016.” The Post reports that many experts say political leaders “still aren’t taking the problem seriously, and in many instances are taking steps that will make it worse,” such as with the White House’s proposed budget cuts the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration by $400 million and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate.

AP (12/20) quotes Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, calling the growing opioid crisis an “urgent and deadly” epidemic that “clearly has a huge impact on our entire society.” Remarking on the two years of consecutive declines in US life expectancy, Robert Anderson, who oversees the CDC’s death statistics, said that “we could very well see a third year in a row. With no end in sight.”

NPR (12/21, Stein, 2.49M) reports that according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, “life expectancy in the U.S. fell for the second year in a row in 2016, nudged down again by a surge in fatal opioid overdoses.” NPR says the last time the US life expectancy dropped “was in 1993 because of the AIDS epidemic,” adding that life expectancy “hasn’t fallen two years in a row in the U.S. since the early 1960s.”

USA Today (12/21, Painter, 8.23M) reports that the life expectancy declines “are shockingly out of sync with a larger world in which lives are getting longer and healthier, public health experts said.” Peter Muennig, a professor of health policy and management at Columbia University, said, “The rest of the world is improving. The rest of the world is seeing large declines in mortality and large improvements in life expectancy” in countries despite income levels.

(Reuters) – Life expectancy in the United States dipped in 2016 as the number of deaths due to opioid drug overdoses surged and total drug overdose deaths rose 21 percent to 63,600, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday. Life expectancy fell to 78.6 years, a decrease of 0.1 year from 2015, the second annual decline in a row and the first two-year decline since a drop in 1962 and 1963.

Opioid-related overdose deaths have been on the rise since 1999, but surged from 2014 to 2016, with an average annual increase of 18 percent, to become a national epidemic. From 2006 to 2014 the rise was only 3 percent annually on average and between 1999 to 2006 averaged 10 percent per year.

In 2016, 42,249 people died from opioid-related overdoses, up 28 percent from 2015, while the number of deaths from synthetic opioids other than methadone, such as fentanyl and tramadol, more than doubled to 19,413, the CDC said.

The 2016 rate of overdose deaths was up across all age groups but was highest rate among people aged 25 to 54.

West Virginia, Ohio, New Hampshire, the District of Columbia and Pennsylvania had the highest age-adjusted drug overdose death rates in 2016.

The number of drug overdose deaths involving natural and semisynthetic opioids, which include drugs like oxycodone and hydrocodone, was 14,487 in 2016.

As the U.S. opioid addiction epidemic has worsened, many state attorneys general have sued makers of these drugs as they investigate whether manufacturers and distributors engaged in unlawful marketing behavior.

President Donald Trump in October declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency, which senior administration officals said would redirect federal resources and loosen regulations to combat abuse of the drugs. However, he stopped short of declaring a national emergency he had promised months before, which would have freed up more federal money.

(Reporting by Caroline Humer; editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Jonathan Oatis)