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When it might be a poisoning

For people in the United States when someone swallowed, breathed in, or was splashed with something that may harm them: a child who got into the pills or the cleaner, a double dose, two products mixed, a button battery, a snake bite, bad food. For the parent, the grandparent, the babysitter, the person it happened to. Who to call first. Swallowed. In the eye, or on the skin. Breathed in. Button batteries. A medicine mistake. Children, and what they get into. Cleaners, pesticides, and pets. A snake bite. Food poisoning. If it wasn’t an accident. And the words to say when you call. No quiz and no score. One thing at a time.

A word with a dotted line under it, like this, opens its official definition, quoted from a U.S. government glossary.

This page and its wording were written with AI (Claude) for Scarlet Beast (our AI policy). The facts come from pages read on October 2, 2026: Poison Control, from the National Capital Poison Center (its front page; First aid guidelines; and Swallowed a button battery?) and the opening screen of its webPOISONCONTROL tool; America’s Poison Centers (the front pages of poisoncenters.org and PoisonHelp.org); MedlinePlus, from the U.S. National Library of Medicine (Poisoning; Household Products; Foodborne Illness; Medication Errors; and Animal Bites: the summaries); the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (Poison Prevention; and, read earlier the same day for our cold weather page, its Carbon Monoxide Information Center); the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Medication Safety and Your Health; Food Poisoning Symptoms; and Cleaning and Disinfecting with Bleach); the Up and Away campaign’s front page; the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (Disposal of Unused Medicines: What You Should Know); the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Venomous Snakes at Work); the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Reduce Your Child’s Chances of Pesticide Poisoning); the front page of the National Pesticide Information Center; the ASPCA Poison Control page; and the front page of the 988 Lifeline. On October 14, 2026 we also read Poison Control’s Safety tips for button batteries, the Centers’ Botulism Prevention page, and the Commission’s Carbon Monoxide Information Center again. The description of Crisis Text Line is from its own front page, read the same day. The National Capital Poison Center, America’s Poison Centers, Up and Away, the ASPCA and Crisis Text Line are private organisations describing themselves; we have no connection with any of them. We did not call or text any line, and we did not try either online tool beyond its first screen. The government’s Poison Help site (poisonhelp.hrsa.gov), FoodSafety.gov and the Drug Enforcement Administration’s take-back page refused our request, so they are not used; because of that, this page does not say how the Poison Help line handles other languages or calls from people who are deaf or hard of hearing. We did not read any first aid manual or CPR course, any clinical guideline, any page about a single product, plant, mushroom, drug or medicine, or the research behind any statement; where the page touches one of these, it says so. Where two sources say different things, the page reports both; since October 14, 2026 that is only the age for honey after a button battery, which the Poison Control passage does not give and the Centers’ botulism page does. Changed on October 14, 2026: the page used to pass on lines from two pages of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ HealthyChildren.org. Its terms do not allow its content to be used with AI tools, so we took them out; the two pages are still linked, without a summary, and the steps for a child, the button battery steps and the tips on storing things now follow Poison Control, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Centers, Up and Away and the Environmental Protection Agency. The page has no questionnaire and gives no score, on purpose: a list is not an assessment. It names no medicine except syrup of ipecac, which it names only because the sources say not to use it; it gives no dose of any medicine, quotes no named person, and gives no figures for how many people are poisoned; the sources have them, with their context. The times and amounts on the page (minutes of rinsing, teaspoons of honey) are the sources’ own. Lines marked “Ours” are our own suggestions; there are more of them than usual in the part about poisonings that were not accidents, because the pages we read say little about that. This page saves nothing: no account, no cookies, nothing you tick is stored or sent, and no analytics (privacy). Scarlet Beast is not a poison center, a clinic or a government agency, and takes no money from anyone named here. Found a mistake? Email [email protected].