Stuff You Should Know - Poison Control Centers: A Good Thing

Episode Date: June 29, 2021

Poison control centers are one of those things you don’t think about until you need it. With all the poisons in our homes you very well may someday. When you do there is a cadre of toxicological specialists ready to oversee the process of saving your life. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles Levy, Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over here and this is Stuff You Should Know. Yeah. How you doing, man?

I'm great. I have not been poisoned yet. I have no need to get on the phone and call an expert. At this point? Luckily my daughter has never been poisoned, although that's a big concern for parents. Yeah, no joke here. No, not joking. Nothing funny about poisoned children unless you're talking about little young Brett Michaels. He was a stitch in a cut-up. Oh, wow. You should see his little Ricky Rocket. I was confused, tickled, and then disappointed in myself all within like half of a second. Oh, I thought you're going to say disappointed in the joke because that's the fourth stage of recovery. I thought it was great. Maybe like a month from now I'll be like, you know, that joke about poison wasn't that great. Yeah. But who knows? Maybe I'll also be laughing

about it years later. For example, I watched UHF the other day for the first time in a little while. Still haven't seen it. Oh, man. And just today, out of the blue, apropos of nothing, I cracked myself up thinking about one of the jokes. Which one? So there's a segment about Conan the Librarian. Somebody asks for a book on astronomy and Conan grabs the guy and lifts him up by his shirt and he goes, don't you know the Dewey Decimal System? Was it Arnold? Was he in it? It was a really good approximation of Arnold. For a second, I thought it was Bruce Campbell, and I actually looked on the credits and it's not. But it looks exactly like Bruce Campbell doing Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know what I watched the other day for the, I think, first

time ever. Did we talk about this? Pumping iron? Yeah, I've never watched it. I think we might have already spoken about this, though. I did. On the show, even. Within weeks. Maybe. Maybe. No, no, no. Definitely not within weeks. No. No, unless like my brain is sloshing around in my skull. I think probably has. Everyone out there is going, yes, Josh, you mentioned it three episodes ago and you're both stupid. It rings a bell that you did mention it, but it was not weeks ago. I think you're confusing your other podcast, Movie Crush. I don't think so, because one of them is good and one of them is. You're crazy. Cutting up. But you're talking about a movie and it couldn't possibly have been mentioned on the movie podcast is what your

point position is. Maybe it was. Okay. But Movie Crush is the good podcast. Oh. Well, I resubmit my, you're crazy. I'm sorry, I just poisoned you. Yeah. And a million listeners. So maybe we should just get going on this. I thought this was really interesting. I think we should take an ad break. No. So yeah, it was interesting and it wasn't based on anything, but curiosity. I realized that I had no idea how poison control centers worked. Like you, I have never had occasion to call one luckily, but they're there and it's kind of like a really great thing that they're there and that they are there to keep scared parents from freaking out because their kid ate something weird or their dog ate something weird or they ate something weird and to basically say,

like, no, you need to get to a hospital. And not only that, I'm going to help you throughout this process of going to the hospital and staying at the hospital because poison control centers are like the most hands-on remote medical discipline there is. Yeah. And if it was a hundred and change years ago, you'd be lucky if whatever you accidentally drank in your house even has ingredients listed on it. And if it did have ingredients, you'd be lucky if they were accurate or truthful because no one cared and you wouldn't be able to call anyone to help. And if you went to your local community doctor, good luck if they're even available a hundred and ten years ago. And if they were, they'd probably be like, geez, I don't really know what to do except maybe try

to make you vomit. Yeah. Nothing more than a two-bit bumpkin was what you had for a doctor back then. Drink a soda pop. Yeah, exactly. The sassafras. That'll do it. And so you might say, well, like, what is a hundred years ago matter? Why not further back? That's a really good question. And the answer to that is that poison control is a fairly recent invention, not because people just thought of it, but because we didn't really need it before because we didn't really have poisons around us prior to about the industrial revolution. Like the closest thing you had to poison was a snake that made its way into your house. You definitely didn't open your cabinet beneath the sink, probably because you didn't have a sink, but also even if you had a sink, you didn't have

like household chemicals at your disposal until industrialization came around. Yeah. I mean, before that, there might have been, you know, you could extract some poison type things from plants and maybe got something at a traveling kind of snake oil situation, but it wasn't like they were on the general store shelves all over the country and then later stores, like you said, until the industrial revolution when we said, hey, it turns out that we can use chemicals and they can be very handy. They are dangerous, but I mean, who would drink a bottle of floor cleaner? People know better than that, right? We don't have to tell them that, do we? Right, exactly. They said, actually, yes, we totally do. And I saw a comparison on a poison

website that still today, people apparently get poisoned, including adults, from accidentally drinking things that they think are other safer things. And they had bottles of stuff next to bottles of other food, and you're like, wow, that really actually does bear a passing resemblance. Pine saw looks a lot like apple juice when you put it next to a bottle of apple juice, and there's a brand of apple juice that looks roughly like the pine saw label. Yeah, I see like that. It's not anything you could drink. The most you would do is probably embarrass yourself, but I see things that look like toothpaste a lot that you would not want to put on a toothbrush and put in your mouth. Where do you hang in around with that looks

like toothpaste that you wouldn't want to brush your teeth with? Well, I mean, there's all sorts of, I mean... Like lubes? Are you lubing it up? They're like Calamine, and I feel like I've seen some other creams and things that look, because it's obviously a good way to carry a toothpaste-like thing, and it's a little tube like that, but a lot of them look alike is my point. I see. So do you have to be like, don't brush your teeth with this reminder? No, no, no, no. I use a children's toothpaste, so it has big dinosaurs on it. I think it wasn't so much back in the day. Like now today, there's basically no excuse because we spent the last 100 years being inculcated into the idea that

there are a lot of dangerous things in our everyday lives, but back in the day, this was all brand new to people, and they just didn't know. Sometimes manufacturers actually didn't know, and they found out the hard way. And because people were suffering from this, it was obvious that there was a need for people to say, okay, we need to start studying these things a little more. And a lot of the great meaning like really fantastic and triumphant government bureaucracies here in the United States arose from protecting like everyday people from the stuff that they were eating as food or using as medicines, like things you're supposed to be able to trust. They couldn't trust back then, so entire sub-disciplines of the medical profession kind of developed to protect people from those

things. Yeah, it was mid to late 1800s when people started saying, hey, this is a problem, this is an issue. I think a lot of journalists did great work early on to expose a lot of this stuff, a lot of these dangers, and say, you know, some of these medicines can be really dangerous. Then a guy came along named Dr. Harvey Wiley. He ran the Bureau of Chemistry, which preceded the FDA, and he had a group called the Poison Squad who were these healthy young men who would poison themselves. They would eat chemicals to see what happened because as you'll see kind of throughout this whole episode, much of the work of poison control from the very beginning all the way up through today is just simply categorizing and listing out things that make people sick and exactly

how they make them sick. It's like a big database. Right, and then in the best case scenario, how to treat somebody who accidentally ingests that thing too, you know? Yeah. But we talked about Wiley in the Poison Squad. We did an episode years ago called, Does the FDA Protect Americans? We talked about them and hats off to them. But between the muckrakers and Dr. Wiley, not just government was kind of forced into action, but the public started to become educated about just how dangerous their everyday life was, where before they hadn't really realized it on any kind of collective level. Yeah, I think it was the, and I know we talked about the Pure Food and Drug Act, right? Didn't you just say that? Not yet. Okay, that was in 1906. They also called it the Wiley Act after

Harvey Wiley. And it basically said, Hey, you got to start labeling stuff. You got to be really clear about what's in certain products, especially if it contains alcohol, heroin, caffeine, cannabis, you got to let people know what's in these products. And again, with the media, they were bringing it to light. And if you were a company at the time, it became a thing where like just from a PR standpoint, you needed to start doing this and be a little more transparent. Otherwise, you would get a bad name if a poisoning was in the newspaper and your product was, you know, kind of to blame. Yeah, yeah, which I mean, that's kind of what the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was predicated on, the idea that a company would want to protect its image or its business

and not suffer ruination from bad PR. But they found out in, oh, I guess the mid 1930s that that just wasn't the case. Well, I think we should do a short stuff on this episode. It's just nuts what happened. But the upshot is that a preparation of sulfonylamide in antibiotic was prepared using antifreeze. Yeah, and to give it like a sweet flavor, raspberry flavor. That's sweet, sweet antifreeze. That's right. But the upshot of the whole thing was that there was no regulation that said, you guys need to test this first, they can just market it. And they actually got them on a technicality, but a hundred people died from this. And that really hastened the 1938 law. I think it was an amendment to the Pure Food and Drug Act that

basically said, okay, not only do you have to label stuff now when it has any kind of chemicals or weird ingredients, you also need to test these things first before you release them to the public. That was a huge, huge foundation that was laid to protect just people like you and me from the stuff that's in our kitchen or our bathroom. And it's not like somebody said, okay, next up, poison control centers. But that was kind of like the zeitgeist that was churning as poison control centers started to come along tangentially to that. All right, so the groundwork is laid. Let's take a break. And we'll come back and get going with in earnest poison control centers.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangeh Shtikler. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove

in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I love these episodes, Chuck, where we spend a full third talking about not the thing. No, but this is all important. I know.

Pete, take it easy on yourself. I'm trying. I'm still recovering from that haymaker you threw earlier. Movie crush? Yeah. Oh, by the way, since we don't do any kind of podcast promotion for our shows at our network, I would like to promote the Allen Ball Six Feet Under anniversary episode. If you were a fan of Six Feet Under, I'm really, really proud of this episode. And go check it out. It's out now. So you interviewed the Allen Ball Creator Six Feet Under. I don't have my basement on my Zoom. That's so awesome. So did you say sixth anniversary? It couldn't be sixth anniversary. No, no, no, 20th. 20th. Oh, okay. I thought you said sixth for some reason. Yeah. Yeah, that's really, and plus, I guess that'd be kind of a bizarre

anniversary to celebrate now that I think about it. The sixth anniversary. When does that come out? It's out. It's live. That's great. Congratulations. Thanks, man. That was a good one. So, all right, you were being unkind to my friend when I had to make that plug. Who, Dr. Chevalier Jackson? No, you. Oh, my God. Emily and I always say that when we're beating ourselves up. We'll say, be nicer to my friend. That is very sweet. All right, so 20th century is going strong. People are starting to understand, and they were making efforts to try and catalog some stuff, but it was really sort of all over the place in the early few decades. I think in the 20s lie that you made soap with, and some people still make soap with,

was kind of one of the big poisoners of children because depending on what form you had it in, it could look like milk or sugar. And there was a doctor named Dr. Chevalier Quixote Jackson who was a laryngologist. That's got to be how you say it, right? Not a laryngologist. I guess so. I'd never said it out loud. I've always said it in my head, but I've never noticed how I say it. So I think you said it. I mean, laryngologists would be what you think, but laryngologists sounds more correct even though it sounds funny. Laryngologists. Yeah, it's got to be that. How about we'll just call them an ENT? Maybe it's laryngologist. Or a laryngealist.

Laryn... No, you're missing a couple of letters there. Laryngealist. Laryngealolist. Yeah, there you go. Oh, goodness. It still cracks me up. Let's just say that word for the rest of the episode. It still cracks me up after 14 years when people, sweethearts, write in and say, hey, you know, I'm an expert if you want to help pronounce, you know, pronounce, pronunciating something. Right, exactly. Hit me up. I'll help you pronunciate all, all day long. Oh, goodness. All right. And what's funny is it'll be like from a laryngealologist. I know. And we'll just never mention laryngealologists again. So... Hopefully. Unless it comes up a lot like our new friend, Molly Bidneam.

Molly B. Molly B is all over. All right. So this laryngeologist was having a lot of cases of kids coming in and swallowing lye wouldn't kill you, but it would tear up your esophagus so bad that you might die because you can't eat, which is just awful. So Dr. Jackson said, we got to really do something about this lye problem and really champion the Federal Caustic Poison Act of 1927, which basically kind of only covered, I don't know if it only covered lye, but it only covered caustic poisons. Yeah. It was pretty narrow and pretty specific. And it basically just said you have to put a warning symbol on it now on those specific things. But it was an early law related to the idea of household chemicals being dangerous to people

and letting people know. Because up to that point, the producers of lye were like, no, we have no interest in labeling our product as dangerous. Yeah. Why would we tell people that? In fact, a lot of them marketed the exact opposite. We're like safe on skin, gentle, you know, like a mountain rain, that kind of stuff. And it's like, no, it's lye. This is like drain cleaner, you know, or oven cleaner. It's like the worst of the worst, but that law got it passed. So that helped lay the groundwork as well. And then in the 30s, there was a guy who came along named Dr. J. I mean, it's spelled arena. So maybe it's arena or arena. Yeah. One of the two. And he was a pediatrician at Duke. And he basically said, look,

this problem extends a lot more to beyond lye. Like there's a lot of chemicals that are poisoning kids. I think he actually did write a thing about lye in particular. But he was saying like, no, this is worth cataloging. I think he started the process. He started the whole cataloging poisons trend that became so huge in the 30s. Yeah. He wrote a book called Beyond the Lye, colon. Just kidding. That subtitle is terrible. So if you want to look at the, might be the father of the poison control center. Yeah, this is the guy. Not quite as awesome as being like the godfather of soul or the queen of soul or the father of hip hop. Or father time. But if you're the father of the poison control center, you've done a lot of good.

And it was a pharmacist in Chicago name. I'm going to say Dahlman, Lewis Dahlman, with a silent G on the front. Does that make sense? I was going to do a shout out to our Australian listeners and say his name is Lewis Goodalman. For all I know, it is Louis Goodalman. But I'm going to say Lewis Dahlman. And he was the first person to really start collecting this data. And he did it on index cards. Like I said, much of the early work and still a lot of the work they do is categorizing and cataloging this stuff, just because you got to know what card to look up if someone calls in to say they've been poisoned. And this was through the 40s. And he established a hotline. Again, this was only in the Chicago area, but you could for,

I mean, 24 seven, basically call and get information. Call him. Yeah. Oh, no, he would answer the phone day or night. Yep. He basically said, I'm starting this, I'm going to be, by God, I'm going to be known as the father or something. And if it's Poison Control Center, so be it. He had his little recipe book cards, literally, and would just sit there and thumb through them and read what he thought was going on. It's amazing. He was very famous. His catchphrase was, hold please. Right. And then you could hear him sorting through and be like, no, that's not fair. Eventually those made it to Microfiche. Thank goodness. Right. So he was not just because he created these index cards and started taking calls 24 hours a day. That's not

the only reason he was the father of the Poison Control Center. He actually started founding with another guy, Dr. Edward Press, the first poison control centers that were beyond like, his bedroom at three in the morning. Right. He founded, I think, 11 of them to start. And then eventually they created a trend that would be followed later where they were consolidated into a single one, which it turns out as far as poison control centers is definitely way more efficient than having a bunch of different poison control centers. Put a pin in there. They had nurses. They had doctors working there. They had people who knew what they were talking about. And they were creating the first database, the first generalized information about poisonings,

about toxicology, like really helping establish this field from taking data from real world examples that were the people who were calling in for help. So it was like a twofold thing. They were helping the people. They were helping the doctors who were helping their patients. And they were also gathering data to create kind of this foundation for understanding the effects of toxic chemicals on the human body. Yeah. And this was, I think, within five years of that Chicago system. There were 265 centers opened in the US, but again, still no sort of central database or national framework or even certification process. They were doing a lot of good work, but these first efforts were really different than today's in a couple of big ways.

One, I mean, the biggest one is that when you call now, you are the human that has just swallowed something calling. Back in the day, if you were poisoned, you called your doctor, then the doctor would call the poison control center and get their advice from there. And I think in 1961 is when these direct calls from the public started to be introduced, which was a big, big, super necessary change. So that, I mean, that is a huge deal to just go straight to the poison control center because before you had to go to your doctor and then they went to the poison control center. And apparently that's still the case in a lot of European countries. But in the United States, you can just call somebody who knows what they're talking about with poisons. And

that is a really big effect that poison control centers have is they, you know, they're not saying that, but they're saying that they prevent unnecessary healthcare spending. Because as we'll see, the vast majority of calls to poison control centers can be resolved at the place that's happening, whether it's work or whether it's at your house or something like that. You don't actually have to go to the hospital. So if you're not showing up to an emergency room or a doctor's office or something, that means that's time that somebody else who does need to be there can be having attention paid to them. And it's just less money spent on healthcare for you showing up. And I saw on some Massachusetts Rhode Island poison control center website,

they estimated that for every dollar invested into a poison control center, it saves $13 in healthcare spending and lost productivity. It's amazing. It really is. And that's a huge function that they play. You know, you think of like poison control centers as basically being like, oh, I just accidentally drank some antifreeze or something. And, you know, I need to call and get some help. But there's, you know, these other roles that are easily overlooked that are really important as well that they play that's kind of evolved over time. Totally. So I mentioned the two big changes over the years. And one was that you call in and said to your doctor, the other big one was back then in the early days, it was almost entirely centered around pediatric poisoning.

And, you know, we have some stats we'll get to later. You can see why children are still the most poisoned in the population, just, you know, from accidents. But it's, they just didn't have a lot of data on adult poisoning back then. So it was really child focused. And they could help with adult poisonings. It's not like they would hang up or anything like that. But it was kids getting their hands on poison was kind of the big, big concern. Yeah. So they're starting to develop in the 30s, 40s, 50s. And then an important person named Leroy Edgar Burnie, who was a surgeon general of the United States in the late 50s, he got involved. He took an interest in the idea of poison control centers, started National

Poison Awareness Week, I believe, and founded the National Clearinghouse for Poison Control Centers, which is, it took that database idea that started out as index cards that Lewis Dahlman created in his kitchen and really kind of professionalized it and made it like this big thing that everybody at all the poison control centers around the country could contribute to and making it this growing body of knowledge. And it also became something of a magnet for grants and funding and all that because everyone recognizes this role of collecting data for toxicology is really important. And that's where a lot of the funding, especially any federal funding that a poison control center might get is kind of aimed toward.

Yeah. And they were still at the time using literal carbon paper to create multiple copies of these things. I think in 74, there was a commercial toxicology dataset put together, finally, kind of an internist called Poison Dex. I love it. It's pretty good. Still in use today, but it was funny reading all this stuff. It's like, I don't know if there's ever been an institution that was more crying out for the internet to be born. Yeah. As far as just as we'll see with consolidation and efficiencies and sharing of information, the internet changed everything as far as this stuff goes for the better. But poison control centers really like when you're mailing pamphlets around the country and you're putting things together with carbon paper and

index cards and even microfiche, it's like all they needed was the internet to really make it a robust system. Yeah. And they did, I think they added by hand 50 million incidents where eventually added little by little. It's a lot of hard work. To what became known as the National Poison Data System, the NPDES, and that's still in use today. So there's a ton of information, like every time you call poison control and they start a case, the details of that case end up being added to the poison data system. And so that database is growing every day. Should we take that second break? I think so. All right. Let's take another break and we'll flash forward to the wild 70s and 80s and see what was going on in the poison control centers.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships,

life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded

up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, it's the 70s. Everybody at the poison control centers are taking pills themselves, sometimes have to call in for help. The 80s weren't much better. And there's some other

stuff going on. Yeah. So in the 70s, they're with the advent of more people abusing pills. That became a larger focus of poison control centers and the toxicology. I think in 74 was when the prescription pill bottles, and I think we talked about this in the, was it in the time at all? No, because that was over the counter. Yeah. Prescription pills were in 1974 as far as childproofing. And that really made a marked difference over the next couple of decades in kids being poisoned by drugs. Yeah, between 74 and 96, the incidence of kids dying from prescription pill poisonings decreased by 45%. So that was a really good federal law. And what's interesting is because of that law and because of these

information campaigns that were drummed up to not just let parents know about the hazards of dangerous chemicals, but also let kids know too, poisonings of children actually declined so dramatically that there was a vacuum left open, basically free time that toxicologists and poison centers had to start investigating and better understanding adult poisoning incidents as well. So there's kind of a shift in the 70s and 80s in that sense. Yeah. And then in the 60s, another one of my favorite things in pop culture history happened is when they decided that, you know, we're using the skull and crossbones to indicate something is poisonous. And it turns out children love pirates. So that's probably sending a mixed

message. So we need to, we need to do something about this. So they mounted in Pittsburgh, what's called the Mr. Yuck Y UK campaign. And it was to get a new logo basically that kids would not want to go drink the product like because they thought it was pirates juice or whatever pirates room. And they did a little thing where they got all these different logos and designs created, showed them to a bunch of kids and said, which ones do you least like, which one of these designs is Yuck to you? And they chose a picture of Martin Screlly's face. It was amazing. Wow, that was quite a buildup. I wish I could read out all the different faces I have on this page before I settled on Martin Screlly. Who else you got? Give us a couple.

I don't really think I can because I took them off for reasons. Oh, I see. Because you can't go after someone hard unless it's a guy like that. You know? Yeah, I got you. Sure, sure. Well, I'll send them to you later. Okay, thanks. Because I got it now. Forget about everybody else. I just need to know. No, it was actually what they call that was Mr. Yuck. And it was the what you see now a lot of times is that sort of sick green emoji face that's really upset. It looks like it's kind of pukey. And kids are like, I don't like that face. So they said, well, I guess that's what we'll start using then. I said, perfect. Yeah. Yeah, that one that was pretty successful too. And then one of the other things that really kind of happened during this time,

because I guess poison control centers were a bit of a victim of their own success. There was this push for consolidation. There was just so many poison control centers. And now they were working thanks to the national poison data system. They were like working in tandem with one another, like they they were sharing information and knowledge and that kind of stuff. But there were just too many of them. There's an unnecessary need or an unnecessary number. And then even more inefficiently, despite the fact that there were 650 almost poison control centers in the United States, only about half of the American population was covered by a poison control center. Like if you were poisoned in Topeka, say, you had to drive to Kansas City and

use the phone to call a poison control center. I made that up, but I bet it's pretty close to accurate. And if those cities aren't correct, the general sentiment is, okay, everybody, so just lay off. And even the most robust poison control centers were getting like maybe 10 calls a day. So that's just really inefficient. Like you said, they were sharing information. That was good. But it was ironically sort of the lack of budgeting that led them to start. It wasn't like they said, hey, let's just start shrinking the number of these centers they were kind of forced to. And then the writing was on the wall. Like there is a much more efficient way to do this, because we're talking about call centers, you know? Yeah. Is there anything that Ronald Reagan

couldn't do, Chuck? He never won an Academy Award. I believe it. Have you seen any of his movies? I haven't, actually. Oh, he was not a great actor. Really? No. They weren't good, particularly. Yeah. I haven't seen any of those old Westerns. So, but the upshot of it, well, he was also in like Hellcats of the Navy. That's where he met Nancy. And that was a World War II picture. Okay. I didn't see that one either. I didn't either. I've seen bits of it. How about that? You know, I have to see a whole Ronald Reagan movie. He wasn't a great actor. But the upshot of it was that there were fewer poison control centers and that actually panned out to be a good thing. Yes. What was surprising to me was despite the fact that automated switching was introduced in

the 70s or the 80s at AT&T, invented in the 70s, introduced in the 80s, it wasn't until 2001 or 2002 that there is a single national 800 number for poison control centers in the U.S. We should say that number. I agree. We should. What if we just didn't mention it? That would be totally us. I actually wrote it down on the front page of the measure. It's 800-222-1222. That's 1-800. You have to do it like a TV commercial. Okay, do it. That's 1-800-222-1222. Again, 1-800-222-1222. We're making a joke, but that's what you're supposed to do. Three times. You got to do it. I think by 2002, that number had shrunk to 64 PCCs in the U.S. That's when that toll-free number was introduced. I'm sorry, it was in 2001,

I think that was introduced. By that time, it went from 650 servicing half the United States to 64 servicing all of the United States. I think it's down to 55 now. It's a lean, mean efficiency machine, all thanks to that national number. There's 55. That doesn't mean there's one in every state and five states have two. There's actually some states that don't have any. I was saying there's a shared regional poison control center between Massachusetts and Rhode Island. There's some states that don't have their own, but everybody is served because they can call that number. It gets routed to either your closest poison control center or a poison control center whose line isn't busy right then. What you're ingesting in San Diego

is probably the same product that you would be ingesting in Burlington, Vermont. It doesn't really matter who you talk to. They're going to also be working from the same data set, the national poison data system. Whoever can get to the phone, you're going to be talking to somebody who is either a doctor, most likely a nurse, or there are specialists, a poison control specialist, who's basically an information person. They're not a healthcare provider, but they work under the auspices of say like a nurse or a doctor at the poison control center. They are certified and ongoing educated in toxicology, so they know what they're talking about. Yeah, so you could go work for a poison control center if you wanted to and not go to medical

school or get medical training. You would just get on the job training. I think there's a lot of pharmacists too that take these calls. As efficiently as they run, it is maybe this is why. They are not like the day-to-day ops are still not federally funded. They do get some federal funding through the CDC for data collection, but a lot of it comes through affiliated institutions, local health departments, like I said, a little from the CDC. I think there was another act, the poison control center enhancement and awareness act provided. I think they provided the funds for the number, but they're still like, hey, you want to keep the lights on and keep it staffed. You're not getting federally funded, which is interesting. It's working though,

so I guess maybe there's something to be said for getting the federal government out of this situation. Sure, but at the same time, it makes you wonder what they could be doing if they weren't chronically underfunded. If they didn't have to have bake sales or do contract poisonings for local mobs or ask for donations. That stat, I got about $1 being invested and turning into $13 saved. That was from a donation page for a poison control center. Come on. Those things should be, they don't have to be bloated or anything like that, but they shouldn't be underfunded. That's just dumb. Yeah, and I think just so people don't misunderstand, I wasn't saying good, the federal government funds too many things, but the fact that they are a lean, mean,

poison control machine, it doesn't surprise me that the federal government is involved. You know what I mean? Yeah, you're like, watch everyone as I turn into a fiscal conservative before your very eyes. Poof. All right. What just happened? I don't know. Did you convert back? No, I'm good. That was close. All right, what happens? You call a poison control center. You're going to get that call answered like you mentioned earlier, not necessarily by the one in Atlanta. If they're busy, they may route you to just a different one. They'll be very friendly. They'll keep you calm. Yeah, that's the impression I have. I didn't actually call one because I didn't want to.

I was scared to, but apparently you can just to get information if you want. Sure. The first thing they're going to do though is route your call. If you just mistakenly called the number because the first one you could think about after a car accident, they would say, they would route you to 911 and say, they'd be like, boy, you must have hit your head or something. That was dumb. Not good. You remembered 800-222-1222 over 911. Are you kidding me? Crazy things have happened. Also, that's another thing too, you can call 911 and they can actually route you to poison control center as well.

Yeah, it goes both ways. I saw frequently they get calls from people who are suffering or think they're suffering like food poisoning. They don't handle that kind of thing, but they will make sure that you get to somebody who does. Right. They're going to talk you through that to begin with, reroute you if they need to. They're going to start immediately providing treatment advice. If it's a real emergency, they're going to tell you what to do in the immediate minutes that you're on the phone. Consult with anyone else they need to. If you do need emergency care and we'll go over the stats here in a second of how many actually do, which is not as many as you would think,

they will call the paramedics. They will call ahead to the local ER. They're going to say, hey, you got someone coming in. His name is Josh Clark. He drank pine salt. He thought it was apple juice and they'll say, Josh Clark, the podcaster. Yeah, he's pretty dumb apparently. And they will arrange kind of for all that ahead of time. They might even order test in the hospital. Maybe a pizza. Maybe a pizza or some other treatment. And they will even monitor and follow up on cases until it's closed. That's amazing. And even if you're going to the hospital, they might coordinate you being transferred to a specialized center. They are really, like I was saying, hands on.

And then even if you stay at home, if they're like, okay, this is good. You're fine. Okay, this is fine. You are overwhelmed by oven cleaner fumes or something like that. Just open the windows, go outside. I'll take a few minutes, but you're probably going to be okay. I'm going to stay on the phone with you, whatever. After you get off the phone, they'll probably call you back in a half hour, an hour or something like that to check on you to make sure you're still doing okay. Like I love poison control specialists. I think they're just the bomb. You know what? Now I'm remembering we did call poison control one time when my daughter was a baby. I totally forgot about this. I don't even remember what it was. It turned out to be nothing.

That's good. I mean, she didn't drink anything or get poisoned, but we thought something might have happened. So you call. And I remember now, this triggered it because I remember them following up almost in a child welfare sort of capacity it felt like. Like did you do something? I remember getting grilled a little bit or Emily getting grilled and us being like, man, poison control is no joke. I'll have to ask her tonight when she gets home, but I definitely remember now that that was just, I remember the follow-up part of it. Wow. And the fact that my daughter lived. I remember that part. Yeah, that part too. So if you do call and they walk you through the case and everything, like we were saying, they'll follow up and all of that stuff gets logged

into the national poison database. Gotta have that database. Every eight minutes across all those 55 poison control centers, all of their new information gets uploaded to the CDC where there's a team of toxicologists who are engaged in toxo surveillance who scan all this stuff to look for signs of say an outbreak of disease, an outbreak of poisonings, an outbreak of a new drug of abuse that people are suddenly using. And that is one of those big unsung functions of poison control centers is they can be the group who notices something that's happening all over the country to where the individual ERs, it's just one person coming in. But to these poison control centers, there's 50 people suddenly around the country who are dropping dead from heroin.

Well, that's not supposed to happen. What's going on with the heroin? There was actually a case in 96, I think, where poison control centers noticed that people were showing up to ERs in the northeast from heroin and they figured out that somebody had added scopolamine to heroin and that people were having really bad reactions to it. And it was the poison control centers who noticed that. Those are what are called sentinel events, which is a, there's a signal, there's a, there's a basically exactly that something is afoot and they can help advise on how to treat it. They can contact the CDC. There's a bunch of stuff they can do. So they're like the first line of defense in monitoring that kind of stuff. Yeah, they've also in the last couple

of decades been more involved with helping to tackle environmental toxic exposure. So like after the 9-11 attacks, obviously, when there was, you know, so much like bad stuff that first responders were breathing in, the anthrax attacks that happened later on that year, stuff like that, they're more and more involved in. So they're really more and more on the front lines of sort of tackling bigger things than my podcast host partner drank some pine salt. Although that's up there. It tasted so bad too, but man, it looked like it was going to be some apple juice. Should we wind it up with some stats? Yeah, let's. Although there's one other thing. I want to say this, you know, we've been touting it's virtues and for good reason,

but it's not a perfect system. And that was evidenced in I think 2012, 2016. I cannot remember, but there was, they kind of famously poison centers missed the rash of tied pod poisonings that little kids were like, this thing looks delicious. Let me eat this. And that there were poisonings as a result, but there was no code that could be entered in the national poison data system. So the poison centers kind of knew it was going on, but they weren't really able to share this information and basically create this, you know, notice that this was a sentinel event because of basically a clerical problem, a clerical issue. And I think they've since solved it, but you know, it's still an evolving ongoing process hammering out how to how to do this. But I think

we were, we were right in generally, you know, trumpeting how great this system is. Yeah, of course. Statistically, a couple of years ago in 2019, 43% of all the calls and we're kids, six and under 42% were adults. So I guess that leaves what 85, 15% between 6 and 18. If you were under six, most of the poisonings were one in two year olds, more boys are poisoned than girls. If you're 13 and under, but more girls than boys, if you're older than 13. Which is sad because it indicates the spike in self harm that poison control centers see as kids enter the teenage years. And it is largely girls. It's not exactly like girls just leaving boys in the dust, but they're definitely in the majority or they're in the lead, I guess,

when it comes to self harm as far as poison control statistics go. But that's also seen in the the unintentional poisonings, like 99.2% of kids six and under, their poisonings are unintentional. Sure. Adult 60% are unintentional. With teenagers, only 33% of the poison calls that come in are unintentional. The rest are considered either self harm, or it's like a drug overdose, which they're not setting out to overdose on drugs, but it's still considered intentional in the fact that they intentionally injected themselves or snorted that thing or, you know, whatever else you do with drugs. Right. In 2019, I think a little more than 76% total were accidental. 18% total were almost 19% total were intentional. And I think 68,000 calls that year were for animals.

We did mention that animals, you know, they, you still want to call your vet, but if your animal ingested a toxic poison from your house, you can call a poison control center to get kind of quick information. And then I think I said earlier, Chuck, that like you can just call and ask them questions and they're totally cool with that. Yeah. Like there's a decent number of calls that come in every year from people saying like, Hey, I want to take the St. John's wort, but my doctor prescribed me this, you know, this heart medicine. Right. Is that going to go okay with that? To the day party? Those would be, right. Those would be the people that you would call and they will give you the info that you need. And if you're looking around your house and wondering what's going to

do it, the top culprits for accidental poisoning at 11%, 11.5% were cosmetics and personal care products. Imagine that. Well, they're so frequently left in, you know, easy to grasp places. They also smell good. They taste good. 1% more than household cleaners. And I think at 9%, you've got pain relief medications. Yeah. Yeah. Algae blooms, toxic mushrooms, button batteries, those are also problematic too. I think though, 66% of all cases are resolved at home. At least they were in 2019. So that is, you know, that's a pretty decent majority. What's that number again, Chuck? 1-800-222-1222. Yeah. You can also go to poisonhelp.org. That's the Poison Control Center's website and you can actually report online too. Do it. There you go. Only if you have a poisoning

or a good question, I guess too. Yeah. But since we said a good question, of course everybody, that means it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this a couple of quick corrections. This is two for your money. Okay. Hey guys, Dr. John Verhoeven, my physical metallurgy professor. I know this one. Yeah. Was from the superior Iowa State, not University of Iowa. I'm sorry. Goose that one up. We have a proud metallurgy tradition, including the purish uranium used in the original Manhattan Project experiment produced by Dr. Harvey Wilhelm. Go Cyclones and that's from Bryn Sutton. Sorry about that Bryn and all of these cyclones out there, I apologize. What's next, Chuck? And then this is another one. This is from Dr. Great Art,

aka Dr. Mark Staff Brandl, a docent and associate professor emeritus in Switzerland. Says there was much to compliment about the art mystery show, but I have one small complaint. Caravaggio's signature in the Malta altarpiece. The F is very well known and not a mystery. There are thousands of paintings by hundreds of artists with this. It is indeed, it is certainly an abbreviation for Fesit. The best translation would be was made by this email message, e.g., is F Mark Staff Brandl, wink, wink. So he says that was really not a mystery and that was a common thing. So we did not know that. Well, thank you, Dr. Great Art and also thank you, Bryn, for that. And also, I think I said that the KFC Yum Center was in Lexington when it's in Louisville. Oh,

boy, you don't confuse those two. That's very bad. No, I'm just going to go ahead and say I've been secretly trolling everybody that I'm well aware of all of these big rivalry there. Right. Yeah. Sorry, everyone. I'm so sorry. I probably won't be back after this. So I guess in the meantime, if you want to send us an email, send it off to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do,

you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band or each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer,

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