Need proof of the deadliness of the opioid drug crisis sweeping London and Ontario? For the first time in decades, the life expectancy of Ontario men has dropped, likely due to the crisis, a new federal report says.

Southwestern Ontario has seen indications of the toll taken by opioids in number-crunching before, but the latest Statistics Canada numbers put the problem in sharp focus.

Men’s life expectancies dropped in both Ontario and B.C. — two provinces hit especially hard by the deadly opioid epidemic sweeping the nation — fuelled by higher mortality rates among males aged 25 to 50, according to a report released Tuesday. In Ontario, men’s life expectancy, at 80.3 years, was down 0.1 years from 2017-2018.

The acting director of the Regional HIV/AIDS Connection says he’s not surprised by the latest StatsCanada report.

“It’s really a significant health crisis that isn’t fully recognized,” Bruce Rankin said of the opioid scourge. The organization runs the supervised drug-use site in London.

“I think the data draws the attention to the crisis and how it’s impacting younger people. There are more people dying (from opioid overdoses) now than were dying at the peak of the AIDS epidemic from AIDS-related illnesses.”

Canadian men’s life expectancy remained unchanged at 79.9 years between 2016 and 2018, the longest stagnation since StatsCan started recording death data in 1921, the federal agency says.

That stagnation was due to an increase in the death rate of men 25 to 45, a spike that offset a drop in the probability of dying in all other age groups, the report says.

“The increase in mortality among males aged 25 to 45 is likely related to the opioid crisis affecting certain regions of the country,” the report says. “In the United States, life expectancy at birth has decreased over the last three years, and many studies show that this decrease is linked to the opioid crisis.”

London demographer Don Kerr says the latest numbers are cause for alarm.

“This caught a lot of people involved in public health off guard, in a certain sense, to see mortality increase among younger adults,” said Kerr, who teaches at King’s University College at Western University.

It will likely take Statistics Canada, which uses cause-of-death data, at least a year to release similar figures for London-Middlesex, Kerr said, noting the region tends to be on par with the national average.

“If things continue on the current trajectory, it’s concerning. We don’t want to see a situation in London comparable to what’s happening in Vancouver,” which saw the lion’s share of B.C.’s 1,533 opioid deaths in 2018.

In Ontario, 1,473 people died of opioid-related causes in 2018, up from 1,261 the year before and 867 in 2016, according to Public Health Ontario.

In an effort to combat opioid overdoses, many Southwestern Ontario first responders now carry naloxone, an overdose-reversing nasal spray.

Pharmacies in Southwestern Ontario also gave out more than 47,000 naloxone kits, including nearly 33,000 in the London area alone, between July 2016 and last April, provincial data show.