Disparities Among In-hospital Unintentional Childhood Poisoning-related Deaths and Underreporting to the Regional Poison Control Center

Purpose: Childhood poisoning is an important cause of unintentional injury death in the United States. In 2014, the American Association of Poison Control Centers recorded over 1,000,000 poison exposures for children under the age of six years with 16 documented fatalities. Like all regional poison control centers (PCCs), our PCC offers medical advice to both lay persons and healthcare providers in an effort to improve patient care and decrease poisoning morbidity and mortality. Unfortunately, we believe there is tremendous underreporting of serious pediatric poisoning cases to the PCC. The …