Just heard an interview with Dr Gary Smith on the BBC about the poisons call centre study. He was saying it was an epidemic, implied that all of the ~4000 kids exposed to Nic became seriously ill, and mentioned the one child who died during the study (which was conducted over 40 months).
I am not sticking up here fro Dr. Smith as he is a scum bag. Stories concerning the poison control
center and the increase in e-cigarette calls started appearing about 1 to 2 years ago and generated
the the usual fear mongering response from the media implying that emergency rooms every
were stacked full with little babies in the throws of acute nicotine poisoning. The government
tracks such information as the amount of calls,the category's of different classes of products
that can cause poisoning and,types of poisons in those category's. Actual outcomes are tracked
by call logs and checked by contacting original sources to determine accuracy. They do not call
back every caller. A certain percentage will determine actual outcomes to a high degree of certainty.
The results show that actual bad outcomes are very low in all category's.
In the case of inquiries involving e-cigarettes not more than a few resulted in a sick child in need of a emergency room visit. Calls concerning tobacco (cigarettes generating the overwhelming majority)
dwarfed the calls concerning e-cigarettes. Ergo,when the Dr. refers to 4000 incidents of poisoning
by nicotine he very well could be telling the truth. However he forgets to mention 3999 of them
are tobacco cigarette related. The one death he refers too is an outright lie. That would be the
child that died in Dec. 2014. When the child was discovered he was already in convulsions with
a bottle of nic base (no brand name inferred here) next to him. Assuming the child was poisoned
the child's caretaker tried to induce vomiting and it quickly became evident that this wasn't going
to work,911 was called post haste. The poison center was never called. I followed this story and read I believe every news article that was released for 2 months. I personally called and spoke to the Chief of the Fort Plains Police dept (who told me he was the first responder to the scene) and,the coroner
in charge of the investigation.
Regards
Mike