The public health win hiding in plain sight: poison centers

Accidentally poisoning yourself is much easier than you might think. 

Once, I took two antihistamine medications on the same night and panicked when Google told me that there might be an interaction between them. So, I called the toll-free Poison Help Line — 1-800-222-1222, listed on many household chemical bottles — and they told me that I was fine, saving me from an unnecessary emergency room visit and needless stress. 

Beyond reassurance, the US Poison Center Network — a constellation of 53 regional centers serving every state and territory — offers life-saving first aid guidance and useful data surveillance. Staffed by medical professionals trained in toxicology, many centers now also offer text and live chat services in multiple languages in addition to the traditional 24/7 helpline. From your grandma unwittingly eating your marijuana-laced brownie to your child swallowing an unknown pill, poison control is there to walk you through what to do next. Many accidental poison exposures are able to be safely managed at home with expert assistance.

In the past 30 days alone, there have been 201,545 reported poisonings in the US, according to the National Poison Data System. 

With so many poisonings happening all of the time, the Poison Center Network is incredibly valuable. In fact, it saves about $3.1 billion every year in health care and productivity costs, according to a new report from RAND, a nonprofit policy think tank. It found that, for every dollar invested, American communities get $16.77 in benefits from lower emergency department use, less time spent in the hospital, better health outcomes, and lower risk of death.

Poison centers are an undersung public health win — a model that has worked, and evolved, over the past 70 years, even as Google and AI become many people’s first go-to for information, even in a crisis.  

Hollowing out a vital lifeline

However, recent budget cuts threaten poison centers’ ability to carry out their life-saving mission, and federal and state funding has not been adjusted for inflation in over a decade.

Poison control centers depend significantly on federal funding sources like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which have faced significant cuts in recent years. The average operating costs for a poison center ranges from $1.2 to $7.2 million, excluding subsidized support. All together, federal funding for poison centers saves $450 million in health care costs alone annually, making them a pretty clearly good investment on the math alone — not to mention the lives and suffering saved. 

The network also contributes an incredible wealth of health and safety information. Its crown jewel, its data system, is the only near-real time public health surveillance system of its kind in the US, with data uploaded every 4.97 minutes. It’s helpful for that data to be as up-to-date as possible, because one poison exposure is reported to a center every 15 seconds.

And their mission has expanded. Poison centers have taken on a greater role in emergency preparedness and response, and many provide additional functions like operating a rabies and Covid-19 hotline, conducting research, and providing telehealth delivery. These “ancillary functions” can generate revenue for the centers providing them through government or industry contracts, helping them to cover operational costs, but they require the centers to offer additional services on top of their core toxicology work. Even with the current coverage, more than 100,000 people in the US died from preventable poisonings in 2023. 

Since 2000, poison centers have averaged more than 3.3 million encounters each year. While total touchpoints have declined since the 2010s, probably because of new online information sources, the average severity of cases has increased. The report found that 30 percent of human exposure cases came from a health care facility or provider contacting poison control, suggesting that poison centers are spending more time and resources on the cases that come to them. 

It can be hard to access health care services, and people need accurate and actionable information in a crisis. And with potentially unreliable and unvetted information online, poison centers, staffed by trained professionals, are a lifeline. 

If you want to find your local poison center and find out how you can support them, click here.