22 people in Windsor-Essex died from opioid-related causes in first 3 months of 2019
'Anything we can do to help save lives' is an option, says health unit
Preliminary data from Public Health Ontario shows 22 people in Windsor have died from opioid-related causes in the first three months of 2019.
"It's concerning," said Dr. Wajid Ahmed with the Windsor-Essex County Health Unit. "We're almost at the halfway mark [from last year] in the first quarter."
Ahmed called the situation "unsettling."
The data shows more males than females have died due to opioid-related causes in Windsor-Essex, with more than half of those who died under the age of 44.
In June, the medical director of the Ouellette Campus Emergency Department said the hospital saw "one or two" patients a week for opioid overdoses.
Recently updated data shows that closer to six people a week visit an emergency department in Windsor a week.
| Emergency Department Visits | Hospitalizations | Deaths | |
| 2018 Total | 214 | 72 | 51 |
| January 2019 | 23 | 7 | 6 |
| February 2019 | 26 | 5 | 7 |
| March 2019 | 28 | 7 | 9 |
| April 2019 | 25 | No data released | No data released |
| May 2019 | 21 | No data released | No data released |
| June 2019 | 25 | No data released | No data released |
In Ontario, more than 1,450 people died from opioid-related causes in 2018.
In the Erie-St. Clair Local Integration Health Network area, 43 people visited an emergency room for an opioid-related cause in March 2019.
Ahmed said there's still no front runner idea to solve the opioid problem in the region, but that it would take collaboration between multiple organizations to come up with a solution.
"We're looking at all the options on the table," said Ahmed. "Anything we can do to help save lives."
WECHU said a supervised injection site isn't off the table, but was just one of the options the health unit was looking at.
"All of these deaths are happening mostly in Windsor, with some in the county," said Ahmed, who expects that trend to continue.
Statistics from Public Health Ontario is collected by the Ontario Drug Policy Research Network and remains preliminary. The above data is accurate as of Sept. 19, 2019.