Pattern of Child Poisoning at Ain Shams University Hospital of Year 2012 Compared to 1983: What Has Changed in Three Decades?

Khalifa, Eman; Sayed, Amany

doi:10.21608/ajfm.2015.18664

Pattern of Child Poisoning at Ain Shams University Hospital of Year 2012 Compared to 1983: What Has Changed in Three Decades?

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Eman Khalifa ¹
Amany Sayed ²

¹ Department of Forensic medicine and Clinical Toxicology, Faculty of Medicine, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt.

² Department of Community, Environmental and Occupational medicine.Faculty of Medicine, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt.

10.21608/ajfm.2015.18664

Abstract

Childhood poisoning is a major cause of morbidity in the developing as well as the developed world. In spite of the success of some interventions to prevent accidental poisoning in the pediatric population, deaths due to un-intentional poisonings still occur
The present study aims to describe epidemiology of child poisoning at Ain Shams University Hospital during year 2012 and to compare the most common poisoning agents during 2012 with that during year 1983.
Descriptive Cross sectional study was carried out atPoison Control Centre (PPC), Ain Shams University Hospital. 4240 cases of child poisoning(age ≤15 years) reach the Emergency Room (ER) during year 2012 and 145 cases during the year 1983 was included. Then analysis were done using SPSS version 18 and all results presented in the form of frequency and percentage.
Results revealed that more than 50% of child poisoning during 2012 were at age group less than three years and accidental manner was responsible for 68.5% of cases, non-drug poisoning was responsible for larger percentage (55.7%) of cases of child poisoning than drugs poisoning (44.3%). The opposite was the condition during 1983, drugs poisoning responsible for more than 83% of cases.