Prevent Poisonings in Your Community – Strategies and Opportunities for Health Professionals Serving Rural and Low-income Populations

The Problem Affecting Our Communities

This accident could happen to any family: A mother is taking her hypertension medication in the kitchen while cooking dinner after a busy day of work; her young son playing on the floor. Just as she is about to screw the cap back on the bottle, a neighbor rings the doorbell and she leaves her son, as well as the open container of pills, on the kitchen table to answer the door. She returns to find her son has knocked the pills off the kitchen table and is playing with a pile of them. She picks up the pills and worries, “has my child ingested any medication? What should I do and who can help me?”

Such accidents are more frequent than you may think. The U.S. Poison Control Centers receive more than 2.5 million human poison exposure calls a year; the majority of these calls concern poisonings among children younger than six^[i]. Of all two year-olds in the US, one in 90 will visit the emergency room because of medication poisoning^[ii]. Because medication often looks almost identical to candy, children are much more likely to accidentally consume pills they find.

What Can I Do?

Outreach workers and health educators can illustrate how difficult it is to distinguish between medication and candy by having parents and community members participate in an interactive and fun online game. It’s called “Pills versus Candy” (www.pillsvscandy.com) and was created by the California Poison Control System (CPCS). If you or a colleague uses this tool to design a health education activity, be sure to also provide the CPCS prevention steps listed below to participants:

1. Place your state’s poison action line number on or near all phones.
2. Use child-resistant containers.
3. Do not store food products and household cleaners in the same cabinet.
4. Always keep products in their original containers.
5. Keep harmful medicines and household products out of reach and in locked cabinets.
6. Never call medicine candy.
7. Do not take medicine in front of children; they love to imitate adults.
8. Many poisonings occur when a product is in use. If the doorbell or the phone rings, or there are other distractions, keep the product with you.
9. Know your plants. Check the CPCS web site at www.calpoison.org, or call your local plant store or nursery.
10. Keep potentially harmful products such as cosmetics, perfume, cigarettes, alcohol, vitamins with iron, and all medicine completely out of reach.

Health professionals serving rural and/or low-income populations should be especially aware of poison prevention measures. Children in rural areas are more susceptible to die from poisonings as they live farther from hospitals and poison treatment centers; people living in impoverished neighborhoods also have a disproportionate risk of being poisoned, as compared to the general population^[iii].