An estimated 2.5 million poisonings are reported in the United States each year. Two-thirds of that number are in children 19 years old and younger. Staff Writer Michelle Rupe Eubanks spoke with Dr. John Fisher, director of the Alabama Poison Center, about poisoning statistics in the state and ways to stay safe.

Q: How long has the poison center been around?

A: I was among those who incorporated the center in 1981, when it opened. It's a 24-hour hotline.

Q: Who's on the other end of the line for a call?

A: The hotline is staffed with nurses, mostly RNs, who, after a year of working at the poison center and taking care of human exposures to poisons, are eligible to take a certification exam.

Q: How many calls do you average in a year?

A: The total number of calls is about 40,000, and around 20,000 of that are calls for human exposure. We get about 1,800 calls related to animal exposure, and we get a number of calls questioning various things what-happens-if calls and calls about radon. We also get a lot of calls from people asking us to help them identify pills or tablets they may have found.

Q: What's the typical nature of a poison call?

A: We frequently get calls from people who may have taken an extra dose of their night medicine or took their morning medicine at night. We also get calls from husbands who may have taken their wife's medicine or wives or have taken their husband's medicine.

Q: Do you often send callers to the hospital?

A: It depends on the medicine and other factors. When they call, we get not a complete but a brief history. We need to know how old they are, any allergies they have, any disease processes they may be going through that require regular visits to the doctor and any kind of medication they may be taking. An extra dose of some medicines is trivial, but, in other medicines, there can be dire consequences.

A: Are you able to treat most poisonings at home?

Q: Eighty-five percent of the time, we can take care of it in the home. When we get around to the value of poison centers being able to save lives and help people, it's that we prevent a lot of unnecessary emergency room visits.

Q: What's your best advice to people to prevent poisonings?

A: One of the things that irritates me most is that people put poisonous materials in old food containers maybe it's gas in an old milk jug. Pesticides before they are mixed look like milk. A toddler gets a hold of that, it looks like milk, and they drink it. The same goes for gas.

The Poison Prevention Center hotline number is (800) 462-0800.