A 10-month-old baby overdosed on fentanyl after finding it on a San Francisco playground, according to the child’s father.
“It could be just a freak thing, but it’s a crisis in general and these kinds of incidents are going to happen unless something changes,” Ivan Matkovic, founder of the IT firm Spendgo, told The San Francisco Chronicle on Wednesday.
Fire officials confirmed to the paper that they revived a child from cardiac arrest at Moscone Park on Tuesday afternoon, and the San Francisco Police Department’s Robert Rueca told the Chronicle that the child had been exposed to fentanyl.
Mr Matkovic also showed the paper a hospital report about the visit, though Sutter Health CMPC says it can’t confirm the document, owing to patient confidentiality.
“I’m frankly ignorant to the fentanyl problem,” Mr Matkovic added. “I’m just a dad that something bad happened to. I just wanted to let people know that along with coyotes and RSV and COVID, this is another thing to add to your checklist of things that you’re looking out for, because we weren’t.”
The father said his child was at the playground with a nanny.
Recreation and Parks Department officials who searched the playground said they found no apparent drugs or paraphernalia that evening.
“Our drug crisis is out of control and it’s affecting all corners of our city,” San Francisco Supervisor Catherine Stefani, whose district includes the park, said on Twitter on Wednesday. “It’s absolutely unacceptable that children can’t safely play in our parks because traces of fentanyl or drug paraphernalia are present.”
The opioid crisis, driven in part by powerful synthetic drugs like fentanyl, has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
In California, it is actually rural counties like Butte and Plumas, rather than San Francisco County, where fentanyl overdoses are climbing the fastest, according to 2020 and 2021 data from the California Overdose Surveillance Dashboard, though more populous urban areas had higher gross numbers of deaths.
According to the dashboard, in 2021, San Francisco had an opioid death rate of 42.56 people per 100,00, compared with nearly 56 per 100,000 in the redwood country of Mendocino County and 67.3 per 100,000 in Alpine County, near the Nevada border.
