Emergency Aid: Children and Household Materials

Merritt Clifton was an environmental journalist and lived in Brigham, Quebec.

Every parent of young children should have Emergency Aid: Children and Household Materials on a handy shelf — it could save a young, curious life. Arthur and Dr. Clem Tester describe what happens when children ingest or inhale over 100 common household products, prescribing appropriate first aid. They answer the first, terrified question parents ask when Junior has gotten into something: “What should we do until the doctor sees him?”

Many panic-stricken people call their local newspaper for advice, for reasons more emotional than logical. As environment, health, and consumer affairs reporter for the Sherbrooke Record, I thus had occasion to field-test Emergency Aid several times before writing this review. Emergency Aid came through in cases of accidental ingestion of mercurichrome and the insecticide rotenone. But field-testing also revealed Emergency Aid’s one critical weakness, a woefully thin treatment of pesticides in general. While the testers carefully examine most toxic substances a small child might find in the medicine cabinet, in mommy’s purse, in household cupboards, or in urban garages and basements, they seem to think children are safe from pesticides “as they are formulated mainly for industrial/commercial use.”

In fact, many thousands of children in rural areas are easily able to crawl into farmyard sheds to sample some of the most lethal chemicals ever concocted, in powdered forms that look like sugar and in liquid forms resembling molasses or maple syrup. The Testers don’t even mention herbicides, but this past summer I received calls about children suffering from exposure to paraquat (7), 2,4-D (7), atrazine (2), and parathion (1). They don’t mention fungicides, but I also received calls about nine children exposed to captan, and one who was exposed to both captan and guthion.

In one case, I was actually called by the attending physician, who had no previous experience with pesticides and wanted to know if I knew any other local physician who did. In six other cases, I found out that the first physicians consulted did not recognize the pesticide intoxication symptoms and consequently did not prescribe the appropriate first aid.

The first aid advice the Testers do provide on farm chemicals is fine as far as it goes. Their biggest failure is that they don’t tell readers how to distinguish quickly between the chlorinated hydrocarbon and organophosphate varieties of chemical, a distinction that could be critical and that is rarely made in so many words on product labels. Second, their index doesn’t help users to find advice specific to the most common farm chemicals. Third, they presume that physicians will know what to do as soon as they’re contacted. In rural Quebec, at least, that’s rarely the case, and where substances like paraquat and parathion are involved, the delay while physicians call around the province looking for advice could be fatal.

A few more pages and index headings in the next edition should solve the problem.

A secondary use of Emergency Aid, for most parents, will be helping them to identify and remove from reach all substances that might harm Junior if he does get into them. This is not the Testers’ primary intended purpose, but Emergency Aid does make intelligent recommendations about product storage and handling. For further details, readers might consult The Household Pollutants Guide, published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest ($3.50 pa., c/o Anchor Books division of Doubleday).