New roles for poison control centres in the developing countries

The primary mission of poison control centres has always been an improvement in the poisoned patients' care and poison prevention. The need to reach this mission implies that many functions and roles must be accomplished. Many centres, even in developing countries, are multifunctional and provide a broad toxicological information service. However, the main challenges of poison centres in developing countries are still treatment information, formal training, laboratory services accessibility and availability of antidotes. At the same time poison centres from developing countries need to accomplish their public health mission through strengthening and expansion of some well-defined roles like toxico-surveillance and environmental health monitoring according to the prevailing and future toxicological problems. Poison control centres from developing countries continue to face old challenges but cannot ignore the new ones that appear in the globalised world. Poison centres have a vital role for environmental exposure surveillance systems for sentinel event detection. Poison centres offer real-time and continuous data needed for preparation and response during such events and also offer a means to report health concerns. Centres from South America were involved in some of the most important environmental health problems of the region e.g., lead contamination (children), children 'occupational' poisoning, and flour contamination with fusarium toxins. Furthermore, poison centres can be the markers of risk factors or identifiers of vulnerable population e.g., changes in drugs prescription patterns, unusual patterns of addiction, unexpected product uses, children abuse scenarios or undetected sources of environmental contamination. In an era of evidence-based medicine and research, toxico-vigilance based on the millions of cases registered by poison centres everyday acquires more and more importance. A new approach of the toxico-vigilance and preventive roles of poison information centres lies in their ability to contribute to risk assessment methodologies with their human data. The data routinely collected by poisons centres could contribute to risk assessment documentation and to define priorities for risk assessment of the harmful chemicals. Although there is some scepticism about the value of poison centres data, the shared volume of human data could validate this information. The international effort of the IPCS/INTOX program, on harmonisation of data collection and terminology for comparable recording of observational human data, has been a great advancement towards handling this problem.