So my name is Susanoyon and I'm the medical director of the Connecticut Poison Control Center. We're going to start the podcast today with little story, very common story that every poison center really in the country encounters at some point in time, you know, in the course of their work. We're going to talk about the little laundry pods. You've seen them in your grocy stores. The little laundry pods are on the shelves right there with the other laundry detergents,
and they are used to clean your laundry. They hit the market in the United States probably fifteen, maybe even twenty years ago, and we moved at that point from kind of powder based detergents to there were a lot of liquid laundry detergents to these little pods. And these little pods and I'm sure you've seen them, but they're wrapped in plastic and they're usually very colorful. But there's
a component of laundry detergent. This is a component in there of usually water softener, other components in there as well, and again all wrapped up in a nice a little plastic pouch. In their single use, we call them laundry pods, but really the technical name is single use laundry detergent. And even before they hit the market in the United States, they had been quite popular in Europe and they had
adopted this quite quite quite avidly in Europe. So the manufacturers of these detergents and these single use pods were quite confident that this was going to take off in the United States.
And it did.
And I want to take you back again fifteen twenty years ago when they just hit the market, and we had this interesting email from North Carolina going, what is up with these laundry pods? I had a child or a child in North Carolina bit into it and got quite quite sick. And I don't call you know, the medical director said, I don't quite understand what's going on. And then we had other people in upstate New York, and then a few months later in Florida going, we
have had the same issues. We have little children who bite into these laundry pods and they get quite quite ill. And we looked at the illnesses and all that stuff. But let's just take a step back here. We are in the United States used to liquid laundry deturches. We've had that product on the market for decades. Children have ingested that product for decades, and never did it result in any really serious injury, certainly never resulted in ICU admissions,
never resulted in death. It was just not our expectation. So here this new product enters the market, or at least a new packaging of the product enters the market, and we're starting to see a lot more ED visits. Children are having problems with it, and we're seeing a lot more admissions to the hospital. We're seeing admissions to the intensive carrion things we had never ever seen before with laundry dechurches.
So something's going on, basically.
And so we sit down, We sit down with each other, We sit down with you know, kind of the pods themselves, start looking at them, start looking at them differently. We even sit down with the manufacturers of these laundry pods. So we sit down with Pocter and Gamble, we'ing, what did you put in those laundry pots? What are the ingredients?
What's going on?
And they came back they said, no, no, no, it's laundry detergent. It is just plain laundry detergent. We're going, what's the pH did you change the pH. Did you do something? And they laughed a little bit when we mentioned the pH, they go, yeah, the pH of that product is lower, meaning it's closer to a pH of seven than our typical laundry product. Because if we had its pH at nine, which is what it usually is, it would destroy the plastic as it's sitting on the shelf,
so we had to lower the pH. Well, if the pH is lower than nine and somewhere between nine and seven, that should be perfectly fine for the child.
So just hitting.
Against a lot of kind of like none of this makes sense. And then I think, after thinking about this and thinking about this and just realizing what it was that we were seeing at the bedside, we came up with likely what the answer was.
So what were we seeing at the bedside?
So these children would bite into these laundry pods sometimes, you know, think about.
These laundry pods. They're under a little bit of pressure.
So when the children the child bites and bites again, often the contents start to squirt out and they could squirt out vertically up, they could squirt out horizontally out of their mouth, or they could squirt out horizontally to the back of their mouth if it squirted up and ended up in their eyes, and we did have a number of ocular exposures. We had a bit of corneal issues. The cornea of the eye was looked, burned, was injured. If it squirted out, you know, that would end up
on the floor, we don't worry about that. If it squirts back, it would hit the back of the throat the uvula. Children aren't very small children, not terribly coordinated in terms of swallowing, and they would kind of choke, cough, and swallow kind of all at the same time because they're not very coordinated, and some of it would end up in their lungs, and we had kind of an
aspiration type of issue. Some of them would kind of go down into the stomach and kind of sort of reside in the stomach as a result, and then we were seeing a few, just a few injuries to the stomach, burns to the stomach.
So studying this and looking at.
This a little bit, it's sort of behave like again, something with a very high pH, something with a very low pH. But this was not the issue here. It behaved a lot like the very concentrated detergents that we have out there. We ended up looking at.
The surf factants.
The surfact it is a component of detergents that stabilize bubbles. We like things to bubble up, right if we if we put a detergent, we wanted to bubble in our you know, in our washing machine. And so because they're packaging such small quantities of detergents, they had to increase the amount of surfactants. And it turns out that the
surffactants were the issue. They are concentrated surfactants, and the concentrated surfactants kind of destroy a little bit the inner lining of the trachea, the lungs, the bronchi and the lungs, and can to some degree wash away a lot of that nice mucus that coats the stomach, causing a bit of gestrointestinal kind of burns. Many many poison centers after a few months were kind of declaring themselves, going, this is an issue.
This is an issue. This is an issue.
So who do you sit with kind of regulate this a little bit. And this is not a food, It doesn't our drug, it doesn't fall under the Food and Drug administration. This falls into the consumer product safety Commissions CPS, and so you sit down with CPS, or at least you alert this to CPS. They have discussions with the manufacturer. They tried to negotiate and kind of arrive at some kind of understanding about what's going on and now.
And since you will.
See the products often often packaged child resistant, bigger packages, it's the double zip pouch. It's a container with a child resistant cap, so there was a child resistant component to it.
So that was part of the regulation. The other part is education needed to occur.
There needed to be a public health education campaign and if you watch your TV you will occasionally see really nicely they really nicely made commercials paid for by the manufacturer, or alerting parents of young children to not let them get a hold of these laundry pods, that they could be dangerous, or them away from children, and so on
and so forth. This all took years, but it was through the work of poison centers that well, first of all, recognize it was a problem, dug in and kind of found sort of what we think likely the problem is, and sort of alerting the federal regulatory entities and having them kind of way in on this.
So it was a terrific, terrific effort. Right there.
We were a little bit puzzled since these products had been in use in Europe for years before they were introduced in the United States.
Don't you have children in Europe? Isn't this occurring? You're like, don't you have this problem in Europe?
And in turns out that yes, they yes, they have children in Europe. But more importantly, they don't have a very cohesive poison center system, so if they were encountering the issues, they really didn't have a great way of communicating that to each other, certainly across countries. And so because of that, they told us, yeah, we did have a problem, but we didn't know the extent of the problem. So now twenty years later, I wouldn't say we never
get a laundry pod exposure. We do, but they're they're they're much fewer and far between. I think parents know now to keep it away from children. I think that's one of the big reasons why we see lag. I think physicians are also much better prepared to take care of these problems. They are and when they arrived to the emergency department, we have a much better understanding of what to do. So we rarely have the ICU admissions the deaths that we recorded years ago, decades ago with
the introduction of the single use of laundry detergents. So I think that's a great success story to share with everybody.
I loved that story so much, erin so much. Yeah, I feel like I remember when tide pods and like Tidepod Challenge was a thing on TikTok or something a few years ago, and then I never really thought, like, why are tiepods so bad? I just assumed all detergents were sabably not good for you.
And that like more people just were eating these because they're cute and like good looking.
For your right and also to just learn how the whole process worked, to be like we see this, what is happening, Let's get to the bottom of it, how do we stop it? Beautiful?
And also like the working across industry and like government and like other bodies like that was so it's so interesting, Like wow, I'm and to.
Hear from an expert. Thank you so much, doctor Doyon for sharing that story with us, and you are going to be hearing so much more from her in next week's episode. To be continued, But first, Hi, I'm.
Erin Welsh and I'm Erin Allman Updike.
And this is this podcast will kill you.
And today, if you haven't guessed it, we're talking about poison control. Yes, we are so excited. We say this every single time, but we are so excited for this episode or should we say these two episodes?
I mean, there is so much more to poison control and it is all so fascinating.
Erin.
You have been talking about your intellectual crush on toxicologists and toxicology for ages, and so I really feel like we're we're digging deep, but not even as deep as we could, Like we're covering so much ground because there's so much ground to cover when it comes to poison control, we're not even digging that deeply, know I When.
You first Aaron brought up the idea of covering poison controls like as a topic on this podcast, I was like, okay, Like I love toxicologists, all of them, and I love the field of toxicology, but I was like, I have no idea, like how to do an episode the way that we usually do things. And turns out can we do it?
Sure?
Can can we do it? Over and over again. I'd love to oh yeah, yeah.
So just to give you a little bit of a rough idea of how the structure of these episodes are going to go, what we're going to do in this first episode is kind of share the story of how Poison Control came to be from its humble beginnings in Chicago, Illinois spoilers all the way to this like beautiful nationwide system that we have today. How did that process begin? Who who looked at this need and said, oh, yeah, we should do something about this. Yeah, So that's going to be this first episode.
It's going to be thrilling. You might not think that, like you would ever have wondered like how did Poison Control Center come to exist? But after this episode you're going to be like, I'm sorry, I will never not think about this, I know, and it will be your new Roman empire? Is that they these days? Is that still a thing?
I don't know. Maybe by the time this comes out, probably not. And then next week we're going to get the chance to interview the provider of our first hand account, doctor Suzanne Douyon, who is not just the provider of our first hand account, she is the medical director of the Connecticut Poison Control Center. Oh my gosh, she's also an associate professor at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine.
I am so thrilled we're going to get to ask her all kinds of behind the scenes questions about like how what goes on at poison control centers? Who do you have to be to work at a poison control center? Or what kind of calls do you get? What? Like, what what happens?
What do you what does one do in poison centers. It's gonna be such a great episode. It was such a fun conversation. We got super nerdy.
Oh yeah we did.
But before we can get into any of that, it's quarantin any time.
It certainly is what are we drinking this week?
This week we're drinking Name your Poison?
Yeah?
You know.
I have these sweet sweet glasses that say name your Poison on them, and they have a bunch of different poison names on them. And I think I've used one once for arsenic maybe I did Paris green or something that sounds right. But I have more, so now I have to pick which one I want to use. I love them. I'm so excited to get to use these.
I mean, we should have any time, but yeah, we should have split into however, many episodes you have of these glasses like that many poison episodes.
Honestly, what I need to do is go back in there and be like, Okay, what can we do? What can we cover for future sos? Add it to our long list of ideas that never is never ending. But in this, name your poison it is. It's delicious. It's whiskey. Name your whiskey. Really, I think a lot of whiskeys will work with this, probably not like a heavily peated scotch, but a lot of them will work. And then peaches and a little bit of lemon juice, some simple syrup.
It's simple, it's delicious, it's amazing, it really is.
Check it out. We'll post full recipe for that quarantini as well as our non alcoholic plusy Brita on our website This podcast will Kill You dot com and all of our social media channels.
Are you following us on social media?
Are you?
You should be? You've got some pretty stellar content coming out. If I do say so, do you.
Toot our own horn like.
We've got reels, We've got you know, other posts. That's all we've got. We've also got a website though, which is pretty sweet. Website has all kinds of cool things, you know. We've got transcripts. We've got a submit your first hand account form, which is amazing thanks to everyone who has ever submitted their first hand account. We've got links to merch We've got music by Bloodmobile. We've got links to our bookshop dot org affiliate account, our Goodreads list, sources, things,
the list goes on. Yeah, all right, can we get to like the episode already?
Yes, Aaron, please start us off with how the heck we got to hear? Aaron?
I will. Let's take a quick break, and then that is exactly what I'll get into. It's midnight. In six hours, you're supposed to be heading to the airport for a two week trip to I don't know, say, Scotland. And even though you promised yourself that you'd be fully packed well before now, with enough time to get a full, glorious eight hours of sleep, that promise has long since been shattered. Tossing in that extra pair of just in case socks, you zip your bag and you sit back,
breathing a long sigh of relief. It's finally over, but your mind is still restless, and it starts to run through the list of non packing things you're supposed to have done. Water the plants, check, clean out the fridge, check, leave instructions for the dog sitter check. Oh God, realized you haven't given the dog his flea and tick medication. What if the dogs that are takes into the park and he gets tons and tons of ticks. You scrounged around for the front line and kneel down next to
your peacefully sleeping dog. Because it's late and because you're desperate to crawl into bed. Your brain doesn't register the bold lettering on the frontline package stating to open away from your face in all caps, complete with illustrations, and you twist open the applicator inches from your face. A burning sensation in your eye alerts you to the fact that something has gone horribly wrong, that a drop of who knows what chemicals has found its way into your eye.
Panic coursing through your body. You run to the sink to flush out your eye, but the burning doesn't cease. What do I do now, you think, Should I go to the er? Have I permanently damaged my eye, who could possibly have the answers. I don't even want to go on the internet. Then it hits you poison control with one phone call. The reassuring voice on the other end tells you that you don't need to go to the er, that you should keep flushing your eye, and
that you're gonna be okay. As someone who personally witnessed this entire incident, my favorite thing.
Erin is that from the first line, I was like, Oh, I know this, I owe the story. This is a real.
Life scenario, a real life scenario. But yes, as a witness to this, it was really amazing to see this resource that I had seen mentioned, I had read on so many medication packages and other packages for my whole life, had never used myself, and then to finally see it be used, and I was just like, this is an absolute gold mine of information that anyone could use at
any time to get potentially life saving instructions. But even though it may seem like it's always been around, that's how it seems to me, it most definitely has not. And so that's the story that I want to tell today. The need for poison control centers is clear to all of us, whether we've used them or not. But who first recognized this need and decided to do something about it. I'll get to the who in a bit, but first let's get into the need, the why that motivated the
who to create poison centers. That sentence was very confusing.
But I loved it.
We'll get there. Poisons, as in substances that have the capacity to cause harm or death to humans, have been around since the dawn of humanity, whether accidental like eating a poisonous mushroom or intentional like lacing someone's dinner with arsenic poisoning has been something humans have contended with forever, and if you haven't listened to our book club episode with doctor Noah Whiteman about his book Most Dangerous Poison from a couple weeks ago, here's your cue to check
it out. For millennia, the concept of poison primarily included substances found in nature, whether from a plant, an animal, or a mineral slash metal and accidentally encountered, slash ingested,
or administered with the explicit goal of causing harm. The Industrial Revolution shook things up a bit, as the number of people working with or using toxic substances, both natural and artificial in manufacturing rapidly increased, and poison grew to encompass those occupationally encountered substances as well, But largely going into the twentieth century, poisons were seen as specific instances poisonings tied to certain substances rather than ambient toxins, unless
you were talking about workplaces where the threat could be environmental, and with the exception of certain medications where paraphrasing Paracelsus
from the sixteenth century, the dose makes the poison. Poisons weren't really seen as a super common household item, which I think is a really interesting thing to think about, because if you asked me to think about the poisons that I would encounter on a daily basis, I'm like, oh, well, you know, there's a lot of chemicals in underneath my sink in my laundry room, like in my garage, there are things that are absolutely toxic.
Right anti freeze, the stuff I used to clean my toilet lea.
Yeah, Like there's a lot. And that has not really that's been a more recent development over the course of humanity, or at least like for most people encountering on a day to day basis.
I don't know.
I just thought that was a really interesting shift.
Is interesting because you don't you don't think about it, and I think too probably like we probably don't often think of those things as poisons, right, but we would think of them as poison us or hazardous to our health. And so it's also that like distinction of like is it a poison or is it poisonous? And like, oh what does it mean?
Yeah, and there's there's a really interesting paper that all put on the website, but there's a lot of fascinating links to the environmentalism movement in the twentieth century as it became recognized that like, oh, these aren't just like specific things that cause one person harm, but these are things that can leach into our entire world, the environment basically. Yeah, and I'm not getting into that here, but I just I thought that was a really interesting perspective on that.
It really is.
But yeah, going into the twentieth century, things were beginning to change as the continued growth of industrial chemistry and food and drug manufacturing brought new products to the market and into the home. I read that between eighteen seventy nine and nineteen twenty, sales of quote unquote, drug, toilet and household preparations for the home increased from forty million dollars in eighteen seventy nine to seven hundred and sixty five million dollars in nineteen twenty.
Just by nineteen twenty.
Wow, I know, and these industries initially faced very light, if any regulation. We've touched on this a bit in our Supplements episode and in our book Club episode featuring Deborah Blum chatting about her book The Poison Squad. But it was a real uphill battle to get manufacturers to
accurately label the contents of their products. The Food and Drug Act of nineteen oh six helped to increase transparency, but just for food and drugs, primarily not household cleaners or other chemicals, which were becoming increasingly popular as marketing campaigns targeted housewives and told them that they needed these products to maintain a sparkling, clean, germ free home. You know, I'm gonna put germ theory in here. It was only
because of germ theory. No, and even if labels on these household these new household products contained information about what was in this cleaner or that cleaner. Who knew what some of those confusing sounding names. Chemical names meant like what's for instance, I pulled a bottle of a window cleaner from my sink. What is isopropanolamine? I probably mispronounced that? Or sodium c tens dash sixteen alkyl benzene sulfonate.
You know things you don't have all of your okem things memorized.
I have tried to block that part of my undergrad from my memory. So that was like thirty years about yeah, or what if you were a child and you couldn't even read those labels. Some magazines like Good Housekeeping published safety information about common household products, but there wasn't a central database where someone could find this information, information which
was growing exponentially by the year. Manufacturers initially placed the responsibility on mothers to know whether or not a product or medication was safe or not and in what amounts it would be a danger, and it didn't provide that information directly, or if it did, it was in like the tiniest fonts possible, where it would say like danger if ingested and you have to get out of magnifying glass.
And to illustrate This is testimony from a nineteen twenty six Senate committee meeting about a bill to appropriately label certain products as poisons. Quote, here is the picture of a child of a citizen of Pennsylvania which swallowed a preparation no as clean all up in the state of Massachusetts. The child's passage to the stomach was totally obliterated. A person saved her life by putting a tube in the stomach. When I asked the mother, why did you let the
child have that? She said why, I did not know that it was poison. And I got her to bring me a can. And here you can see on this can that I have here, which was bought in the stores, that there is not only no poison label whatever on it, but it says quote does not injure the finest fabric or the most delicate skin. Now, how could you expect any mother to think that thing was dangerous?
End? Quote?
Wow?
Right, that's really interesting.
I mean, and that's a whole separate episode, like the labeling of products as poisonous or toxic or whatever. And even still today, I was kind of going through some of the cleaning products and there's not a whole lot of like blatant Holy cow, you know this is really bad, right, Yeah, it's like.
If contact with eyes rints and call poison control if ingested cal poison control, Like that's all they say.
Uh huh huh. And it's like, we're not going to freak you out here, We're gonna let somebody else tell you just how back.
How freaked out to be. So hopefully you read enough English to be able to see this on the label and know how to call.
Yep, yeah, yeah, yeah. And some of it didn't even call poison control, just said like seek help or oh interesting or and then some doesn't have some don't have the poison control number. Anyway, I think that's really labeling. Who knew there's so much to a label, but there is?
Is that gonna be our new knitch, Sharon.
I'm into it.
I'm there.
As a reaction to this, these these issues surrounding labeling, and as part of a larger trend in consumer protection, regulation was passed in the US to help oversee the labeling of these products and in some cases the packaging, such as childproof lids, which varied in their child proofness. You know, some reports of like a kid had to instruct the mom how to open the baby aspirin, which tasted like candy, and then it's like that's a whole thing too, where it's like, uh, it tastes like candy,
it must be candy anyway. But this didn't really seem to make a huge dent in the frequency of accidental
poisonings in the home, especially for children. And part of this rise in the frequency of accidental poisonings in children was certainly due to the wider availability of potentially dangerous household products with or without labels, But another big part was that these accidental poisonings were becoming much more visible thanks to what was happening in the background in terms of medicine, essentially the drastic reduction in infectious diseases as a leading cause of mortality in children.
I never thought about that. So it's like we've fixed we're fixing this problem, and so now we have like more bandwidth to be concerned about this other problem.
Right, So it's like how much I mean in epidemiological studies of even accidental poisonings were rare in the nineteen forties, but before then, like who even knew?
Right, how interesting?
It's Yeah, vaccines and antibiotics and other medical advancements had slashed the rates of infectious disease cases and deaths by I think, a rate that is unfathomable to many of us today, upwards of ninety percent, especially for children. You know, morte due to infectious disease was absolutely slashed. Incredible vaccines, man, vaccines.
They can't say it enough, I know.
And as many deadly infectious diseases became preventable, another leading cause of death, also viewed as preventable in children, took their place accidents, especially accidental poisonings. By the nineteen forties in the US, studies found that seven out of ten accidents resulting in death for children under the age of five took place in the home, and the numbers were rising.
In nineteen thirty and estimated eleven percent of all deaths among those aged one to four were caused by accidents, but in nineteen fifty that had risen to seventeen percent. There was one group, though, that didn't need to see these numbers to know that there was a concerning rise in the incidence of accidental poisonings among their patients, and that was the pediatricians. When a child ingested or got into something that they should not have, which that's what
they do. Parents often turned first to pediatricians for answers. My kid just ate this or drank that? Are they going to be okay? What should I do?
Like?
How do I proceed? Pediatricians and other healthcare professionals did their best to answer these questions, but as the number of household products grew, it became more difficult to keep a grasp on what was in this cleaning product or that furniture polish. You know, this disinfectant, that insecticide, and so on, like more and more and more and more, and not only like what is in these different products, but like what do you do afterwards? How much is
an okay amount to ingest? Is there an okaymout to ingest?
You know?
Like all of these different decision trees, How is one person or even one doctor's office supposed to hold all that information at once, especially as things are growing? And this is need I say, pre Internet.
So right, they couldn't google it, They couldn't google it.
And to say this was frustrating for the pediatricians I think would be a huge understatement, because pediatricians saw accidental poisonings as a largely preventable cause of death. With so many opportunities at many different stages or layers to reduce their incidence.
Right.
There could be better design, like with childproof lids or childproof containers or cabinets that where you could store these things under lock and key. There could be better labeling transparency saying whether or not a substance was toxic and needed a childproof lid or needed to be locked away in that cabinet. There could be less toxic formulas, like maybe we don't need industrial strength pesticide in our garage, right,
Maybe there are other ways. There could be lots of different stages in terms of like design at the front end of things. Right, But even with all of these extra safety measures in place, kids still get into things. Kids are still going to get past that lock and key. They're still going to get into that child proof past a childproof lid.
You know.
It's just very they're very good at it experts.
Yeah, it's how it is. And so a crucial layer of protection against accidental poisonings was access to information about what was in these products and the best course of treatment for an exposure. With hundreds of thousands of trade name substances on the market and rising that information was impossible for any one person or one doctor's office to
keep track of, but some people still tried. One of these people was Chicago pharmacist Lewis Godalman, who began working as the director of the two person pharmacy department of Saint Luke's Hospital in show Cago in nineteen thirty. The other person was the delivery boy. Isn't that cute?
I don't know why.
I love that.
I love that that detail was in this paper I read.
I read really good.
It just so happened that at Saint Luke's the pharmacy department was located right across the hall from the emergency room, and Godalman, with his pharmacy and chemistry background, would get requests for information from er docs and other hospital staff, wanting to know whether a patient that had just eaten some type of poison or toxin was in danger or
what kind of danger they were in. Over time, news of Godalman's expertise spread beyond the hospital and spilled over into other hospitals around Chicago, then around Illinois, then around the country, and even into the general public. And his phone number was published in all emergency references, and so Godalman would get phone calls at all hours of the day, like twenty four hours a day at work at home, and he never refused to call. He knew as much
as any one person could about this. Realizing that speediness and efficiency was key, he began writing out information on little note cards like index cards, where he could quickly access the most relevant info, like maybe the most commonly purchased products, or the ones that were like, oh, we need this second smatter here, let's get this information first, And by nineteen fifty he had amassed quite the stack
of cards. But still, it's just one person, right, one human, one human, one human, and there's only so much that one person could do, and given that his phone never stopped ringing, essentially there was a clear need for a standard,
formalized service to provide this life saving information. In nineteen fifty two, the American Academy of Pediatrics established it's Accident Prevention Committee, and one of the first things they did was survey the most common household factors associated with children's accidents, and they found that fifty percent of the reported accidents involved poisoning, which was much higher than anyone had expected to find, except probably for the pediatricians who were seeing
these patients like every day. These findings, combined with the impact of Godalman's informal poison control hotline, led to the first official poison control center being established at Godalman's Hospital Saint Luke's Hospital, in November of nineteen fifty three.
I love it.
I do too.
I want you to keep going, Okay.
Just a few months later, the second poison control center was named in Durham, North Carolina, and over the next few years, hundreds more followed. Hundreds hundreds. I mean, has there been anything that has caught on so quickly in medicine? I mean probably, but like still it's impressive.
And so did goodolmans like stash of cards like get grandfathered to all of these places? Like did the information make it to all of these new centers that were opening up?
Yeah, So I don't know about the logistics of that, but that was something like I don't know whether that precise stack of cards or the info that he had there, or whether they just adopted his technique. But that is something that I'll talk about in a second. In terms of like organization, yes, orgnation, et cetera.
Yeah, I love.
It, but I want to read you a bit from a nineteen fifty four paper where the rationale for this poison control program like generally was proposed. It's kind of a long quote quote. There is a toxin that maybe more deadly than that generated by the germs causing typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria, or leprosy, and this toxin has already spread to almost every household in the United States. Although there are a variety of strains of this toxin and many type specific groups,
sublethal attacks usually confer no immunity. We are speaking of the ready made and often highly virulent test tube toxins synthesized by modern industry and used in millions of households to clean clothes, kill flies or rats, provide heat, and
accomplish many other everyday tasks. The same machine age responsible, through its advances in sanitation, immunization, chemotherapy, and antibiotics, for controlling the damage done by the toxic products generated by germs that caused epidemics, has, by similar advances, posed new threats to life and health.
End quote.
Test tube toxin, test tube toxin.
You want that on a T shirt? I love it, but I love.
That I think it kind of it wraps it up so nicely where it's like put all into perspective, like, here's this world. We can see how far technology has allowed us to come in terms of medicine, in terms of technology, in terms of other things. And yet and yet yeah, and we need to do something about that. And yet right, and we can do something about and
we can and we are and we will. Yeah. Over the rest of the nineteen fifties, poison control centers grew in leaps and bounds, and there were certainly some growing
pains to work out. There was still some inefficiency or inconsistency in how information was gathered and transmitted, and so in nineteen fifty seven, the FDA established the National Clearinghouse for Poison Control Centers, which essentially acted as a place where information about poisons and toxicology was gathered and then distributed in the forms of bulletins, index cards, and so on.
The following year, nineteen fifty eight, the first meeting of the American Association of Poison Control Centers was held in Chicago,
and the majority of attendees and members were pediatricians. Throughout the nineteen seventies and into the nineteen eighties, poison control centers continued to grow in number, shooting up to six hundred at one point nationwide in the US at one point in the nineteen seventies, and then eventually it began to grow in coordination, which led to fewer centers overall, because it was like, we don't need a poison control center at each hospital or at each doctor's office, like
we can have one consolidator, the area consolidation yep efficiency. In nineteen eighty, the creation of a national database for all poisoning cases in the US really helped to centralize information and also helped to demonstrate the impacts of these poison control centers. For instance, in nineteen seventy two, at least two hundred and sixteen children died as a result of poisoning. In two thousand and seven, that number would dropped to thirty nine. And remember, during that time, the
US population grew a lot. But besides the obvious and incredible effect that poison control centers have had on providing life saving information to get people the help they need, they have also dramatically helped to reduce healthcare costs, especially when it comes to emergency healthcare utilization, which I know you'll talk a bit more about later.
On so much.
It's thrilling, it's amazing. But another core, and I think sometimes underappreciated aspect of poison control centers, is that they represent something that seems harder and harder to come by these days, a reliable source of factual information that provides answers, guidance, and often peace of mind for nothing, for nothing, in minutes, in minutes, instantaneously.
It's true phenomenal to call poison control. Yeah, like the amount of information, how detailed the information, how factual the information, and when you're in a panic, how reassuring that information is. You cannot overstate it.
Yep.
Absolutely, And I feel like nowadays so many of us go straight to the Internet to seek answers to our questions, whether that's like what headphones should I buy? Or what's this mole on my arm? And where we're met with an absolutely overwhelming tsunami of information, good and bad, and opinions also good and bad, and we can sift through results and forums for hours and emerge on the other side with no more clarity than we had at the start. But when you don't have the luxury of time, and
you need accurate information immediately from a trusted source. That Reddit thread from five years ago about somebody accidentally squirting frontline in their eye, it's not where you're gonna want to turn right. Instead, you're going to want to call poison control, where the voice on the other end has the answers that you so desperately need.
And I think that also can't be understated because if you go online and search for anything like, you will never come to an actual answer. You will see every possibility, which inevitably ends with well it could be colon cancer, because that's how all Internet searches about anything medical end. Huh, Like, you can't get an actual answer. But when you call poison control at the end of it, there will be
an answer. It will be either you don't need to panic, don't worry about it, you need to go to the emergency room, in which case they will continue to follow by the way as you go to the emergency room. Or it will be something else. But it will be like a concrete answer, like do X, Y and Z steps and if that doesn't work, then do abn C steps Like it's it is so.
Concrete in that way, yes, that is concrete.
Is great.
It is like no waffling, there isn't Oh well, let me just keep you know it is. This is the sequence of events. This is how we're going to make our decisions.
Yeah, decisions will be made.
I love it so much.
I've loved every conversation I've ever had with poison Control. I have had several. It's so I love it.
We're big fans.
Big fans if you can't tell.
But that's that's poison Control. That's the story of how we got to where we are today, more or less, more or.
Less, I really love. Like I I wish that I
could talk to good Almond. I know he has passed, but I just wish that like imagining the series and like the conversations that happened between him and like people at AAP and like you know, other people that were like in these medical organizations and then talking to people in state governments and federal governments to get this funding and to get started and at the hospitals, like and to have it now exist the way that it does today, Like that is just it's so cool.
As a household name, like hopefully everyone knows about poison Control or they do after this episode. Yeah, and it's on package like it is, just it makes so much sense.
It does.
Yeah, and it's of course it exists, Yeah, of course it exists.
Yeah.
But also Aaron, we have, like I have more questions, and those questions are mostly like but it exists, yes, but awesome? What does that mean? How does it work?
Happens when you what happens? Who are we talking to?
Yeah? How do they know what they know and what to tell us and in what order? And everything?
Everything?
And they know so much?
How this so much when you talk to them on the phone. How do they know all of the things.
I'm sure that all of you all out there also have these burning questions, and you're in a lot of luck because next week that is exactly what we'll be getting into with our amazing provider of our first hand account and also the medical director of the Connecticut Poison Control Center, doctor Suzanne Doyon. A big thank you again to doctor Doyon.
Make sure that you smash that subscribe button so that you don't miss that episode when it drops next week. It's going to be great.
It's going to be great. And to tide you over until then, if you're like, oh, my gosh, but wait, poison control guess what, there are sources that you can release.
So I have a long list of sources. Actually for this episode, I'm going to shout out just a few of them, and then you can check out our website where you can find lots more So, the one that I mentioned earlier in the episode where I was talking about sort of the rise of environmentalism, that is by Burnham from nineteen ninety five and it's called how the discovery of accidental childhood poisoning contributed to the development of
environmentalism in the United States. Another source that I used is by Burda and Birda from two thousand called Taking a Stand against Accidental Childhood Poisoning The Founding of the Nation's first Poison Control Center in Chicago. And then there was a paper that I liked from nineteen seventy eight because it was a little bit older, so it had a different perspective on like the history of poison control centers.
This was by Shares and Robertson and it was titled the History of Poison Control Centers in the United States, so from nineteen seventy eight, so it was like very new at that point. But I liked that anyway. You can find a full list of all of our sources on our website. This podcast will kill you dot com, so go check it out.
Thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and every single one of ours.
Thank you to Leanna Squalacci and Tom bry Foegel for the amazing audio mixing.
Thank you to everyone exactly Right Network.
And thank you to you listeners. We hope that you are as jazzed about poison control centers as we are.
Jazz is a good word, super jazz like jazz fingers over here. Yes, and especially thank you to our patrons. We appreciate your support so so, so so much. We can't say it enough.
Yes, thank you, thank you, thank you. Until next time, wash your hands.
You filthy animals. Five