Kent Hospital offers tips to prevent carbon monoxide home poisioning

Posted 4/25/17

Kent Hospital's Wound Recovery and Hyperbaric Medicine Center offers a few steps to prevent a tragic carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning in your home or the homes of your friends and family. Kent Hospital is Rhode Island's largest hyperbaric medicine

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Kent Hospital offers tips to prevent carbon monoxide home poisioning

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Kent Hospital’s Wound Recovery and Hyperbaric Medicine Center offers a few steps to prevent a tragic carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning in your home or the homes of your friends and family. 

Kent Hospital is Rhode Island’s largest hyperbaric medicine facility, and the only hospital offering 24-hour emergency hyperbaric oxygen therapy in the region.

Carbon monoxide is a colorless, odorless gas produced by incomplete burning of fossil fuels – oil, gas, wood, propane, coal.  Normally, CO gas is vented safely to the outdoors.  However, when vents become blocked by animal nests, improperly installed vent pipes or other means, CO can back up into living spaces and quickly poison the people and pets living there.

Carbon monoxide poisoning can be hard to recognize – low-level exposure may cause no more than flu-like symptoms while toxic levels build up. If flu-like symptoms quickly improve when you leave the home, suspect carbon monoxide poisoning and seek medical attention and get your house checked right away.  

Fire departments carry the equipment to check house levels when poisoning is reported. Higher exposure levels can cause death (often within minutes) or permanent brain and heart injury.  Symptoms may include shortness of breath, nausea, headaches, dizziness and light-headedness.

Immediate measures to take are:

Get everyone, including pets, out of the house and into fresh air immediately, then call 911.

If you can’t get everyone out, open all doors and windows.  Turn off any fuel burning appliances. 

Take anyone exposed to carbon monoxide to a hospital emergency room as quickly as possible. A simple blood test will show if carbon monoxide poisoning has occurred and must be done right away.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is available at Kent Hospital to quickly dissipate the CO poison, which can save lives and reduce long-term effects of the poison.

CO poisoning can kill quickly. Survivors may experience headache, nausea, vomiting, muscle pain, joint pain, chronic fatigue, dizziness, numbness, tingling or vertigo. They may also have effects such as attention problems, short-term memory problems, irritability, anxiety and sleep disturbance. Blurry or double vision, buzzing in the ears, decreased coordination and speaking, eating and swallowing disorders are also possible. Some may even experience seizures, balance problems and tremors.

By far, the best approach to this silent killer is prevention. Some tips are:

Have your heating system and chimney checked each year before the heating season begins

Install carbon monoxide detectors in your home and test them monthly.  Replace as recommended by the manufacturer. The better carbon monoxide detectors will alarm for low levels. Detectors that provide alarm for only high levels of poison will probably prevent death from CO poisoning but will not alert you to low level poisoning, which can cause permanent physical and neurological damage to family members over time.

The Wound Recovery and Hyperbaric Medicine Center at Kent is a unique regional referral center, composed of physicians and clinicians who are experienced in advanced wound care and help to heal diabetic ulcers, surgical wounds, ostomy problems, bone infections and other chronic concerns. Specialized techniques speed healing and may help avoid amputation. The center cares for patients throughout southeastern New England and is housed in a facility on the Kent Hospital grounds.  The center received national accreditation with distinction and offers advanced hyperbaric oxygen chambers, which are available 24 hours a day for emergency referrals needing immediate intervention. To make an appointment or for more information call 736-4646.

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