AAPCC.org

The American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC) supports the nation's 55 poison centers in their continuous efforts to prevent and treat poison exposures. They offer free, confidential medical advice 24 hours a day, seven days a week through their hotline at 1-800-222-1222. This service is established for the purpose of reducing hospital costs through in-home visits through information, advocacy, education, and research. The poison center encounters either situations involving an exposed human or animal (exposure call) or a request for information with no human or animal exposure to any foreign body, viral, bacterial, venomous, chemical agent, or commercial product (information call).

According to the AAPCC current national report, 91,306 calls were received in 2014. This number has decreased from the previous year by 19.5%. The most common information requested about drugs recorded were the drug interactions, followed by the drug information, questions about dosage, inquiries of adverse effects, and therapeutic use and indications.  Also in 2014, intentional exposures accounted for 16.7% of human exposures. Of this, suicidal intent was suspected at 11.2% of these cases, intentional misuse was at 2.5%, and intentional abuse at 2.2%. Unintentional exposures outnumbered intentional exposures in all age ranges except for ages 13-19 years, where intentional exposures were reported more than unintentional exposures in this age group.

For routes of exposure, ingestion was reported for 83.7% of cases, followed by dermal at 7%, inhalation/nasal at 6.1%, and occular routes at 4.3%. For the exposure-related fatalities (1, 173 cases), ingestion was reported at 81.4%, inhalation/nasal at 10.1%, unknown at 7.8%, and parental at 5.2%. More than one route could be reported for each exposure-related fatality cases.

Top rated substances include: Analgesics, cosmetics/personal care products, household cleaning products, sedative/hypnotics/antipsychotics, antidepressants, antihistamines, cardiovascular drugs, foreign bodies/toys/miscellaneous/ pesticides, topical preparations, alcohols, vitamins, cold and cough preparations, stimulants and street drugs, anticonvulsants, hormones and hormone antagonists, antimicrobials, and more.

Most human exposures, 87.7% of 1,898, 862 were acute cases compared to 944 acute cases among 1,835 fatalities (51.4%). Acute cases are defined as single, repeated, or continuous exposure occurring eight hours or less. Chronic exposures are defined as continuous or repeated exposures occurring more than eight hours. Chronic exposures comprised 2% (44,088) cases of all human exposures. Acute-on-chronic exposures are considered single exposures that have been preceded by a continuous, repeated, or intermittent exposure occurring over a greater period than eight hours. This was numbered at 8.9% (192, 428) of all human cases. Within the last decade, the percent of exposures determined to be suspected suicides ranged from 30.3% to 53.9% and the percent of pediatric cases has ranged from 1.5% to 3.2%.

The reason for most human exposures were unintentional (79.4%), unintentional therapeutic error (53.8%), and unintentional misuse (5.8%). In 2014, the participation poison centers logged 2,890,909 total encounters including 2,165,142 closed human exposure cases, 56,265 animal exposures, 663,305 information calls, 6,085 human confirmed non-exposures, and 112 animal confirmed non-exposures. The cumulative AAPCC database contains more than 62 million exposure case records. A total of 17.764.183 information calls have been logged into the AAPCC database since the year 2000.