The wide variety of calls received by the Hawaii Poison Center are described. These include the typical, humorous and calls unique to the islands. Methods include descriptive anecdotal recall and review of Hawaii Poison Center call statistics. A brief description of staff, resources and call taking procedures are also provided.

Introduction In 2010, there were 4,796 snake bite exposures reported to Poison Centers nationwide (1). Health care providers frequently request help from poison centers regarding snake envenomations due to the unpredictability and complexity of prognosis and treatment. The Missouri Poison Center (MoPC) maintains a surveillance database keeping track of every phone call received. ESSENCE, a synd...

Howard S. Kim, MD* and Andrew A. Monte, MD Denver Health Residency in Emergency Medicine, Denver Health Hospital and Authority, Denver, CO, and the Center for Education in Health Sciences and Department of Emergency Medicine, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL (Kim); and the Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, and Ro...

Poison control centers hold great potential for saving health care resources particularly by preventing unnecessary medical utilization. We developed a four-question survey with three poisoning-related scenarios, based on common calls to our poison center, and one question regarding after-hours calls. We identified primary care provider offices in our poison center's region from an internet sea...

background: poisoning incidents, in both children and adolescents, are known to occur in new zealand but little is known about the agents implicated.   methods: all the calls received over the ten years between 2000 and 2009, by the national poison centre in new zealand, were retrospectively reviewed. calls related to cases involving those less than 19 years were included. the data were analyze...

Loperamide is an over-the-counter antidiarrheal with opioid-receptor agonist properties. Recommended over-the-counter doses (range = 2-8 mg daily) do not produce opioid effects in the central nervous system because of poor oral bioavailability and P-glycoprotein efflux* of the medication (1); recent reports suggest that large doses (50-300 mg) of loperamide produce euphoria, central nervous sys...

Drug information service is a dedicated and specialized service provided by pharmacists to enhance knowledge of medicines use, promote rational prescribing among prescribers, and reduce medication errors. Saudi Arabia has a National Drug and Poison Information Center (NDPIC) responsible for answering drug queries. There is a lack of literature that reports the current scenario of drug informati...