Connecticut Health Investigative Team (http://c-hit.org/page/2/)
In 2018, Dean and Paula Palozej found their son, Spencer, on the floor of his home in Manchester. Spencer was one day shy of his 30th birthday and he was found dead of a fentanyl overdose.
Spencer, who worked as a landscaper, started taking oxycodone for pain after two surgeries in his early 20s. A friend told his father that he took a fentanyl pill thinking it was oxycodone.
Every day for 10 months in 2012, Peter Antioho walked through dense, black smoke from an open burn pit on his Army base in Afghanistan. Human and medical waste, plastic water bottles, ammunition and chemicals were among the materials burned with diesel fuel 24 hours a day.
While tolls, bonding and the budget have dominated this legislative session, a battle has been quietly brewing over the creation of a state-administered health insurance public option for small businesses.
Pharmacy benefit managers – the middlemen who negotiate drug purchases for insurers and large buyers – are coming under growing scrutiny and criticism both in Connecticut and nationwide for their role in the sharp rise of prescription drugs.
Betty Williams says giving up crack cocaine was easier than her ongoing struggle to quit cigarettes.
“A cigarette is a friend,” said Williams, who lives with schizophrenia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
State investigations of elder abuse, ranging from neglect to emotional abuse to physical abuse, more than doubled in Connecticut between 2011 and 2017, from 3,529 to 7,196.
Advances in early detection and cancer treatments have resulted in a 27 percent decline in cancer deaths in the U.S. in the last 25 years, but those benefits are slow to trickle down to those who are lower on the socioeconomic scale, according to a report by the American Cancer Society.
People struggling with hunger suffer from a disproportionate number of chronic illnesses and often rely on food pantries for their groceries. So, pantries are now being urged to undergo a sea change and abandon their traditional emphasis on calories and nonperishable items in favor of more nutritional food.