The recently published 32nd Annual Report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers’ National Poison Data System (NPDS) reveals that in 2014, someone called a poison center about every 11 seconds.
Developed in 1983, NPDS contains information on more than 60 million poison exposures mapped to a products database of over 419,000 specific products.
Approximately half of all human exposure cases managed by poison centers in 2014 involved children younger than 6 years, but as in previous years, many of the more serious cases occurred among adolescents and adults.
While overall incoming call volume to poison centers continues to decrease, cases with more serious clinical outcomes (moderate, major, or death) have increased by 4.29 percent per year since 2000.
“The fact is that despite an overall decrease in calls to poison centers in 2014, poisoning continues to be the number one cause of injury-related death in the country, and with the proportion of more clinically serious exposures managed by poison centers increasing, poison centers are more important to America’s health care system than ever before,” said Mowry.
In 2014, around 57 percent of all exposure cases involved pharmaceuticals. Common scenarios for unintentional pharmaceutical exposures included inadvertent double-dosing, wrong medication taken or given, other incorrect dosage, doses given/taken too close together, and inadvertent exposure to someone else’s medication.
Other exposures were to household products, plants, mushrooms, pesticides, animal bites and stings, carbon monoxide, and many other types of non-pharmaceutical substances.
Ingestion was the route of exposure in almost 80 percent of the cases in 2014. However, people were also exposed to potentially dangerous substances via the lungs, skin, eyes, and other routes.
Similar to previous years, the majority of human exposures managed by poison centers in 2014 were unintentional. Intentional exposures accounted for 17 percent of total cases, with suicidal intent suspected in 11 percent of those cases.
Also similar to previous years, in 2014 most calls to poison centers originated from a residence, and the majority of exposures were treated at the site of exposure. In fact, poison centers save Americans more than $1.8 billion every year in medical costs and lost productivity. In addition, the poison control system is extremely cost-efficient. It takes just $0.43 a year per U.S. resident to fund the nation’s entire poison control system—55 centers staffed 24/7 by experts tirelessly providing free services. That’s less than $2 to provide vital poison control services to a family of four.”
In 2014, 21 percent of exposure calls came from health care facilities. “Calls to poison centers originating from health care facilities are an increasingly significant proportion of overall poison center exposure call volume, speaking to the increasing clinical complexity of the types of cases that the experts at poison centers help to manage,” said Jay L. Schauben, PharmD, director of the Florida Poison Information Center in Jacksonville, and current AAPCC President.
Poison centers are equipped, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, to manage an array of calls, from poison-related information to treatment advice for more serious exposures. Keep the Poison Help phone number 1-800-222-1222 handy.
Other findings in the report include:
• The substance classes most frequently involved in human exposures were analgesics (11.3 percent), cosmetics/personal care products (7.7 percent), household cleaning substances (7.7 percent), sedatives/hypnotics/antipsychotics (5.9 percent), and antidepressants (4.4 percent).
• Unintentional exposures outnumbered intentional exposures in all age groups except in the age category of 13-19 years.
• Schools were the site of over 27,000 exposures. However, only about 10,000 calls to poison centers were made from schools.
The report is in the December issue of Clinical Toxicology and is available at www.aapcc.org.