US President Barack Obama on Tuesday announced new plans to combat the epidemic of heroin and prescription painkiller abuse which kills tens of thousands of people each year in the United States. About a dozen funding measures and initiatives were detailed by the White House nearly two weeks after the US Centers for Disease Control urged doctors to exercise more caution prescribing opioids, which can be highly addictive and have led to soaring overdose deaths in recent years. Forty Americans die each day from prescription opioid overdoses, according to the CDC.