The Slient Epidemic: National Drug Overdose Deaths

Dash dashboard visualizing America's drug overdose death rates.

https://dsci-532-2024-16-silentepidemic.onrender.com

What are we doing:

Problem & Importance

Our research group is concerned about the alarming rise in national drug overdose deaths and want to provide additional education for upper high school students. This issue is of significant concern due to several factors:

1. Increasing Overdose Deaths: Overdose deaths, especially those involving synthetic opioids like fentanyl, have increased significantly in recent years.
2. Unintentional Overdoses: Many overdoses are unintentional, often occurring because individuals underestimate the dangers of mixing drugs or are unaware of the potency of the substances they are using.
3. Need for Education: There is a critical need for effective education programs that can equip students with the knowledge and skills to identify the risks of different drugs and recognize the signs and symptoms of overdose.
4. Target Demographic: The target demographic for this education is upper high school students, as they are at an age where they may be exposed to drugs and are at risk of drug misuse. By providing them with the necessary knowledge and understanding, we can empower them to make informed decisions and reduce the risk of drug overdose.

How Our Dashboard Helps

The SilentEpidemic dashboard was created as a teaching tool for high school students in California. It is intended to raise awareness for the increasing rate of drug overdose deaths within the general population and within the 15-24 age group. The dashboard highlights the discrepancies in drug overdose deaths by ethnicity and sex, and also shows the rise in opioid-related deaths over time.

Our dashboard visualizes:

• Overdose Trends: Shows a clear upward trend in national drug overdose deaths over time, particularly focusing on the rise in synthetic opioid-related deaths.
• Drug Risk Comparisons: Visually represents the relative risks associated with different drug categories, highlighting the dangers of synthetic opioids compared to other substances.
• Demographic Disparities: Highlights potential risk factors by ethnicity and sex to identify high-risk student populations.

Contributing

Interested in contributing? Check out the contributing guidelines. Please note that this project is released with a Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

Running the Dashboard Locally

Below are some quick steps to run the app locally.

1. Clone the repo:

git clone git@github.com:UBC-MDS/DSCI-532_2024_16_SilentEpidemic.git
cd DSCI-532_2024_16_SilentEpidemic

2. Create and activate the virtual environment using virtualenv (if you are new to virtualenv please check out the documentation):

virtualenv ./venv
source ./venv/bin/activate

3. Install all necessary packages via pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Run the dashboard:

gunicorn src.app:server

How to Get Help

Running into issues? Please feel free to create an issue in our GitHub repo and describe what is the problem. When submitting the issue, please provide as much related information as possible so that we can find out the root causes and address them.

Contributors

The SilentEpidemic dashboard was created by Orix Au Yeung (@SoloSynth1), Yingzi Jin (@jinyz8888), Alysen Townsley (@AlysenTownsley), Bill Wan(@billwan96)

License

The SilentEpidemic dashboard is licensed under the terms of the MIT license and Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Please refer to the license file for more information.

References

1. Dataset Reference: National Institute on Drug Abuse. (2023). Overdose Data 1999-2021 [Excel file]. Retrieved from https://nida.nih.gov/sites/default/files/Overdose_data_1999-2021%201.19.23.xlsx