Common food poisonings that you should be aware of. Anyone can be affected by these common house products, your neighbors child or stray animals.
How can a poisoning happen? Can it happen in your backyard? Or even in your house? Statistically 90% of poisonings occur in our homes. That makes it a little scary to think even our houses are not safe from us getting poisoned, but what in our homes is or can be so deadly? Read on and you may be amazed.
First of all, let us talk about the four ways poisonings happen. Ingestion, although most of the time we think of cleaning fluids as a ingested poison, something as common as a type of mushroom or shellfish depending on the person and their allergies. And of course, the last and most deadly thing in our houses that can be poison even deadly is medicines. If they are not taken properly or by the person they are prescribed for any kind of adverse affect can take place! Inhalation, this can happen from something as harmless as a car, breathing in too many of those fumes can really hurt the brain! A few other examples of inhalants are cleaning fluids again; mixing the wrong combination can also be deadly and of course recreational drugs. Absorption, as much as this one sounds strange when we think about it Poison Ivy is absorbed through our bodies and although it is classified as an allergic reaction it is still a poisoning. So with that in mind many plants when rubbed up against can be poisonous as well as fertilizers and pesticides. The last way of being poisoned that we are going to talk about it Injection. Injection is the most common way I think can be from anything like insects to medicines and again drug uses.
So now that we have talked about what can poison us, lets talk about how to recognize a poisoning and what to do for it. In any sudden illness or injury our senses are our best tools. The very first step is to look for signs that would indicate that a poisoning has taken place! Next call 911 with the information you have of the persons condition, again use your senses, and give them as much information as possible. The next and most important step is to call poison control center; the local number should be listed in the phone book. Be calm when you talk to them, it is very important to listening and hear everything they say so that the information can be relayed to the emergency personnel. Lastly try to keep the victim or person involved calm. If they need to throw up that is a good sign they are getting the poison out of their body, let them throw up unless otherwise directed by poison control.
As scary as all this may seem it is very important for us to be aware of what harm can happen to us and how to prevent it and care of it. A couple good tips are"¦
- Keep the local poison control number by the phone along with the number to call in case of an emergency.
- Teach your children at a very young age that cleaning fluids are nothing to play with
- Start your car in the garage with the door open to prevent the inhalation of fume.
- Wear insect repellent before walking in the woods or rolling around in the grass
- Keep medicines out of children's reach!
