This week marks the 50th anniversary of National Poison Prevention Week. For the first time ever- poisoning surpassed car crashes as the number one cause of injury deaths in AZ and more than 2,000 kids had to go to emergency rooms last year from unintentional poisoning.  Kids under 5 had the highest rates of non-fatal emergency department visits from poisoning.  For more information on poisoning in Arizona, check out our recently posted Poisonings Among Arizona Residents, 2010 PowerPoint. 

Nationally, more than 60,000 young children end up in emergency rooms because they got into medicines while their parent or caregiver was not looking.   The new  Up and Away and Out of Sight  educational program was created to remind families of the importance of safe medicine storage. 

Phoenix Magazine also wrote a story that explains prescription drug abuse from the perspective of someone battling chronic pain.. it’s called Bad Medicine and is in the Top Docs issue… so hopefully a lot of people will read it, take stock of their “inventory” and dump it before there are more accident poisonings.