Poison center has new number

Herald Writer

With a face only a mother could love, Mr. Yuk, the symbol for dangerous substances, has been keeping kids away from toxic household chemicals for more than 30 years.

But while the sickly green face on the sticker remains the same, the phone number is new.

This year, Mr Yuk stickers will display the same toll-free national number. Until December, Mr. Yuk stickers were imprinted with a local poison center’s phone number. And with 65 poison centers across the nation, the numbers sometimes proved confusing.

"This one number is proving to be very effective," said Dr. Bill Robertson, medical director of the Washington Poison Center in Seattle. "For example, if we lose all our power here, we push a button and send all our calls to California."

The national number has already proved its worth, he said.

When nurses in Portland, Ore., went on strike, they had no one to staff their poison center. They pushed a button and the calls were switched to a poison center in another state, Robertson said.

The newly minted Mr. Yuk stickers with the new toll-free national number 800-222-1222 are showing up around the state this month. Their appearance coincides with National Poison Prevention Month, which runs through March 31.

The current local number for the Washington Poison Center, 800-732-6985, will be active through the end of the year, said Robertson, who has managed the center since 1963.

The state’s poison center will continue to operate, and calls to the national number will automatically switch to the state center, unless there is an emergency.

In the 1950s, there were 1.2 million chemical combinations known to science; by 2002, the number had jumped to 40 million, Robertson said. The first poison center originated in Chicago in 1950.

"It was a thousand five-by-eight index cards," Robertson said.

Distraught mothers and fathers waited on the phone while the duty nurse thumbed through the cards. Each listed a different product name or generic name, chemical makeup, signs and symptoms of poisoning and possible treatment.

"The U.S. surgeon general heard about the cards and had them mimeographed. They were distributed to any health department that wanted them," Robertson said.

In the early 1950s, Washington was one of the first states to establish a poison center, which was housed in an office at the University of Washington.

"The poison center was a secretary at the UW who answered the phone from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and then went home — as she should," Robertson said.

In 1956, the poison center moved to Children’s Medical Center in Seattle and onto microfiche in 1964. In 1984, the information was transferred to its present format on CD ROM.

"Now we have more than a million items in our database, and we can get to them in 11 seconds."

Unlike other children across the nation, Puget Sound-area kids tend to be "flower eaters," Robertson said.

"They get into the rhododendrons a lot, although they don’t make anybody sick."

And closer to home, Providence Everett Medical Center is one of the poison center’s busiest customers, Robertson said.

Mr. Yuk has become a widely recognized symbol of hazardous substances, but he has competition. In some Midwest states and Alabama, officials developed a sticker called Officer Ugg to discourage kids from reaching for a bottle of bleach.

"In the old days, there were the Mr. Yuk advocates and the Ugg advocates, but that just confuses the issue," said Dr. Alvin Bronstien, medical director of the Denver Poison Center.

Poison centers can choose either, or the new national symbol, which depicts a skull.

"It’s not that one symbol is better than the other. The issue is parents need to educate their children — don’t drink the Tide. That’s what’s important."

You can call Herald Writer Janice Podsada at 425-339-3029 or send e-mail to podsada@heraldnet.com.

The new toll-free national poison center number is 800-222-1222.

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