Public Health said that there have been unconfirmed reports of hospitalizations and deaths associated with the pills, but did not provide further details.
Most of the patients in the Augusta area were ages 25 to 49, the state alert said. The number of overdoses “is higher than normal for us,” said Jonathan Adriano, a public health official in the Augusta area.
State officials detected the pattern of overdoses from “syndromic surveillance,’’ a method of categorizing — nearly in real time — people’s visits to emergency rooms and urgent care facilities. Drenzek’s alert said this surveillance is based on the chief complaint that a patient reports at an ER, not on the patient’s eventual diagnosis, so a case will initially be referred to as a “suspect overdose.’’
Public Health said it first noticed the counterfeit pill trend in mid-January. The GBI told Georgia Health News that there were currently no related investigations into the overdoses.
Fentanyl is 50 to 100 times more potent than the painkiller morphine. As a prescription drug, fentanyl can be given in the form of transdermal patches or lozenges, but it also can be diverted for misuse and abuse, according to the CDC.
