Fentanyl is a powerful opioid anesthetic and analgesic, the use of which has caused an increasing public health threat in the United States and elsewhere. Fentanyl was initially approved and used for the treatment of moderate to severe pain, especially cancer pain. However, recent years have seen a growing concern that fentanyl and its analogs are widely synthesized in laboratories and adulterated with illicit supplies of heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and counterfeit pills, contributing to the exponential growth in the number of drug-related overdose deaths. This review summarizes the recent epidemic and evolution of illicit fentanyl use, its pharmacological mechanisms and side effects, and the potential clinical management and prevention of fentanyl-related overdoses. Because social, economic, and health problems that are related to the use of fentanyl and its analogs are growing, there is an urgent need to implement large-scale safe and effective harm reduction strategies to prevent fentanyl-related overdoses.

Wireless Body Area Network is an emerging technology that is used primarily in the area of healthcare applications. It is a low-cost network having the capability of transportability and adaptability. It can be used in location independent and long-term remote monitoring of people without disturbing their daily activities. In a typical WBAN system, sensing devices are either implanted or etched into the human body that continuously monitors his physiological parameters or vital signs. In such a network, trusts among the stakeholders (healthcare providers, users, and medical staff, etc.) are found of high importance and regarded as the critical success factor for the reliability of information exchange among them. In remote patient monitoring, the implementation of trust and privacy preservation is crucial, as vital parameters are being communicated to remote locations. Nonetheless, its widespread use, WBAN, has severe trust and privacy risks, limiting its adaptation in healthcare applications. To address trust and privacy-related issues, reliable communication solutions are widely used in WBANs. Given the motivation, in this paper, we have proposed a trust-based communication scheme to ensure the reliability and privacy of WBAN. To ensure reliability, a cooperative communication approach is used, while for privacy preservation, a cryptography mechanism is used. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using MATLAB simulator. The output results demonstrated that the proposed scheme increases service delivery ratio, reliability, and trust with reduced average delay. Furthermore, a fuzzy-logic method used for ranking benchmark schemes, that has been concluded that the proposed scheme has on top using comparative performance ranking.

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