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About
Public health initiatives depend upon accurate and complete data to support effective prevention activities.
One critical role of poison centers is their unique position to collect, analyze and report data that describe the incidence and outcomes of poisonings in our nation. The majority of the more than two million toxic exposures reported to US poison centers annually are never treated in any health care setting. Therefore, if data from these exposures were not collected by poison centers, they would not be recorded by anyone and would remain invisible to the medical professions. The nation would have no knowledge of the causes or effects of more than a million injuries occurring in homes, schools, and public places every day.
Our extensive data collection also makes poison centers an integral part of efforts to promote homeland security. The Virginia Poison Center 's data is uploaded in real time to the American Association of Poison Control Centers. In cooperation with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, call data is analyzed for clusters of suspicious cases or toxic syndromes. This timely data analysis could help to identify a potential release of a chemical or biological weapon agent and allow more rapid response to such an incident.
We are pleased to make available our annual report [pdf], which summarizes the statistical data from calls to the Virginia Poison Center. You may download the report using Adobe Acrobat.
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