I-Team: State Now Tracking 'Substance Exposed Newborns'
BOSTON (CBS) - The scope of the heroin and opiate epidemic continues to plague the state every day. Governor Charlie Baker is making the crisis a priority for his new administration.
Some in the medical community say that can't happen fast enough, as they're treating a growing number of innocent victims: newborn babies.
"It is awful, they get right into your heart," said Dr. Brigid McCue, director of OB-GYN at Beth Israel Deaconess in Plymouth. "Over the last few months, we are seeing an uptick. We have seen seven in the last six months, which I think is probably double for us."
Dr. Alan Picarillo, Chief of Neonatology at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, is the co-chair of a state wide collaborative examining the problem of drug exposed infants. "Certainly in Massachusetts and New England as a whole, the increase has gone up even higher than what we've seen nationally."
The state is now tracking so called "Substance Exposed Newborns" in a new way, to get a better handle on the scope of the problem. The I-Team found that last March the state tallied 132 substance exposed babies.
As the overall crisis grew, so did the number of substance exposed newborns, spiking at 236 in September. The number came down a bit by November, the last month with data available.
"It's on Cape Cod. It's in North Adams. It's in North Barrington. It's in Methuen," said Dr. Picarillo. "We thought it was only going to be in the large cities. It's not. It's in every small town."
These babies pay a steep price, often spending weeks in the hospital. "They become incredibly irritable, very difficult to console," said WBZ's Dr. Mallika Marshall, a board certified pediatrician. "In some cases they have seizures, and what doctors do is maintain them on methadone or morphine and then try to wean them slowly."
Dr. McCue isn't surprised by the rise in the number of cases, saying real life always comes in the maternity ward. But dealing with the consequences in person never gets easy. "We had two moms who had babies here last year who died of overdoses, and their babies were not in their custody and everything was identified properly. But how sad is that, that a new mom chose her drugs over a baby?"
The state's new record keeping shows more than 1,500 substance exposed newborns over a nine month period. Dr. Picarillo estimates that's just under 2% of all babies born in Massachusetts.
