Financial Difficulties Threaten the Nation’s Poison-Control...

WASHINGTON — Anxious for quick information, callers to an eastern Ohio poison-control line instead got this message this month: “The services of the Mahoning Valley Poison Center are no longer available. . . . Consult your physician.”

The nation’s poison centers, beset by financial difficulties, continue to close, cut services and scrounge for money to stay in the business of saving lives.

There were some 2.3 million calls to poison control centers last year seeking fast telephone help in treating people who had swallowed harmful substances, suffered animal, insect or snake bites or inhaled toxic fumes. Nearly 1 million of the calls involved children under 6 years old.

Federal health officials have been researching possible funding options since last summer and are expected to report on them before the end of the year.

St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Youngstown, Ohio, can no longer afford the $260,000 it costs to support the Mahoning Valley center, which closed Aug. 1 after three decades, said administrative director Nancy Siefert. The facility served four counties along the Ohio-Pennsylvania border.

Even the nation’s capital hasn’t been immune.

The National Capital Poison Center that serves the District of Columbia and neighboring counties in Maryland and Virginia was in danger of closing last year. But it has cobbled together enough money to stay open at least through June, said Rose Ann Soloway, administrator of the American Assn. of Poison Control Centers.

High-volume poison centers in Arizona and Illinois escaped closing this year as smaller ones in Illinois, Michigan and Ohio folded. Meanwhile, Washington state consolidated four poison centers into one.

“This is a situation that has really not been resolved,” Soloway said.

The Duke University Poison Control Center will be closing its doors Aug. 31 after more than 40 years after losing the $238,000 in state funding, said medical director Dr. Shirley Osterhout.

“This is something we’ve been dreading for years,” Osterhout said.

But North Carolina won’t be without a state poison control center. The work will be taken over by Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, which already was running its own center and won the state contract.

Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala expects to present Congress with a funding plan by spring, a year later than lawmakers had requested, said Jean Athey, director of a program for children’s emergency medical services at HHS.

Athey’s office is sponsoring two research projects, one of which is an analysis of various funding proposals, such as grants to states to help them support poison-control centers, said Ted Miller, a consultant to HHS.

Other funding ideas include surcharges on telephone calls and copies of birth certificates, billing people who call the centers and taxing the makers and distributors of consumer products associated with poisonings.

The second research effort is to examine ways to provide poison-center services for less money and whether the federal government should run them.

Poison centers get money from state and local governments, hospitals that host or use them, and private sources. They receive no direct federal funding, although some states pay for them with federal block grants.

Some states also have specific measures to support them.

Texas imposes a surcharge on all intrastate long-distance telephone calls. New Jersey requires its hospitals to subscribe to poison-center services for a fee. In Louisiana, after poisoning victims began filling hospital emergency rooms, the state squeezed money from its 1992 budget to reopen the statewide poison center that had closed in 1988.

Consumer advocates who want Congress to fund the poison centers directly say funding becomes a low priority when governments and hospitals run short on cash, leaving the centers with few places to turn for support.

“It’s a story that is still important and has not gone away,” said Ken Giles, spokesman for the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which depends on the centers for poisoning data.