Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #112411

Monique Sheppard, PhD and Cecelia B. Snowden, PhD. Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, 11710 Beltsville Drive, Suite 300, Calverton, MD 20705, (301) 755-2728, Sheppard@pire.org

Counting poison-related injuries has been shown to be particularly problematic. One issue is that the definition of poisoning differs across levels of severity as well as data systems. To overcome this issue, an expanded definition of poisoning was developed based on data from the Toxic Exposure Surveillance System (TESS). TESS data are based on human exposure calls to poison centers across the United States. The TESS data system,unlike hospital or mortality data sources for poisonings,captures acute alcohol and drug, adverse effects, food poisonings, venomous bites and late effects cases. The expanded case definition was applied to data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) for hospitalizations and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) Multiple Cause of Death (MCOD) Files for fatalities. Medical and work loss costs for 1999-2001 fatality, hospital and human exposure (TESS) data were use to compute the economic burden of poisoning injuries. Based on the expanded definition, 2.4 million poison incidents occurred in the U.S.,including over 27,000 fatalities and 316,000 hospitalizations. The medical costs for fatal poisonings was $153 million and for hospitalized poisonings it was $2.5 billion. The additional cases and costs produced by the expanded definition are critical to the understanding of the public health impact of poisoning. In order to develop and implement effective evidence-based policy, it is critical that the definition of poisoning be expanded so that there better uniformity across data systems.

Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of the session, the participants in this session will be able to

• Assess the impact of an expanded definition for poisoning in terms of incidence.
• Articulate the costs associated with the expanded definition and how these costs can be used to inform injury prevention and public health policies and programs.
• Apply an algorithm to sources of poisoning data (hospitalization and mortality) in order to identify additional cases.

Keywords: Injuries, Surveillance

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.