As the opioid epidemic continues to grow, young children are now unwillingly facing the consequences. On Tuesday morning, paramedics had to administer Narcan to a 6-year-old boy who was found unconscious in his Manchester, New Hampshire residence. It’s suspected he had overdosed.
This had been the first time American Medical Response used the narcotic antidote to revive a child. The incident only foreshadows future events that may occur to children and those who are involuntarily swept into the ongoing opioid crisis.
Luckily, the young boy is alive after hospitalization and is in stable condition as of Thursday. He is now in the care of a different family member than who he had been with during the incident. As of now, no arrests have been made.
“It sort of just gives me the chills and I’m thinking that nobody is really untouched by this thing,” Jon DeLena, Drug Enforcement Administration assistant special agent in charge, told CNN affiliate WMUR.
Police are now attempting to solve the mystery of how the boy came to fall unconscious. Authorities are unsure of what he was exposed to or what was ingested. All they know is, once the Narcan was administered, he started to respond.
“When you have a young child, it could be as simple as touching an area on a kitchen table, or a spoon, or a sink, or a doorknob,” Lt. Brian O’Keefe told CNN affiliate WBZ. “If there’s trace amounts of some kind of opiate derivative with the fentanyl or carfentanyl, it can have dire consequences.”
Opioids can be absorbed easily into the body just through skin contact, and the consequences sink in quickly. It only takes 2 to 3 milligrams of fentanyl, equivalent to five to seven grains of table salt, to be fatal, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
For a child, a lethal dose is even smaller. Just 1 to 1.5 milligrams, or smaller than a head of a pin, is enough to be deadly.
