Accidental poisoning statistics cover several related but non-identical categories, including unintentional exposures, therapeutic errors, drug overdoses and carbon monoxide events. In the United States, poison-center surveillance recorded more than two million human exposure cases in 2022, while other systems measured emergency visits, hospitalizations and deaths across narrower populations and periods.
Key Accidental Poisoning Statistics
The most broadly useful figures are:
- 2,064,875 human exposure cases were closed by U.S. poison centers in 2022.
- 76.4% of U.S. poison-center human exposure cases were unintentional in 2022.
- 613 reported human exposures per 100,000 population were recorded by U.S. poison centers in 2022.
- 28.7% of reported human exposure cases involved children younger than 3 years in the United States in 2022.
- 40.2% of reported human exposure cases involved children age 5 or younger in the United States in 2022.
- 6,954 reported exposures per 100,000 one-year-olds were recorded by U.S. poison centers in 2022.
- 92.5% of reported human exposures occurred at a residence in the United States in 2022.
- 82.7% of reported human exposure cases involved ingestion in the United States in 2022.
- 331,539 therapeutic-error cases were reported to U.S. poison centers in 2022.
- 30.8% of therapeutic-error cases involved inadvertent double-dosing in the United States in 2022.
- 87.3% of reported human exposures were single-substance cases in the United States in 2022.
- 84.4% of human exposures were acute exposures lasting 8 hours or less under the NPDS definition in the United States in 2022.
- 39.5 poison-center carbon monoxide exposure calls per million people per year were recorded in the United States during 2005–2018.
- 70.5 carbon monoxide emergency-department visits per million children ages 0–9 were recorded across 17 U.S. states during 2005–2018.
- 1.1 million drug-poisoning emergency-department visits per year were estimated for the United States during 2008–2011.
- 32.6 age-adjusted drug-overdose deaths per 100,000 people were recorded in the United States in 2022.
- 92.3% of U.S. drug-overdose deaths were unintentional in 2022.
- 1,328 emergency-department visits and 100 hospitalizations were estimated from accidental poisonous-mushroom ingestion in the United States in 2016.
Contents
- National exposure volume and poisoning trends
- Age, sex and setting patterns
- Drugs and therapeutic-error statistics
- Carbon monoxide poisoning data
- Children and household-product poisoning
- Emergency care, hospitalization and death
National Accidental Poisoning Exposure Volume and Trends
The 2022 Annual Report of the National Poison Data System (NPDS) from America’s Poison Centers recorded 2,064,875 closed human exposure cases across U.S. poison centers. NPDS captures cases reported to participating poison centers, so it is a surveillance count rather than an incidence estimate for every poisoning event in the country.
2022 Annual Report of the National Poison Data System (NPDS) reported that unintentional exposures made up 76.4% of human exposure cases, including 45.1% classified as unintentional general exposures, 16.1% as therapeutic errors and 8.57% as unintentional misuse.
The report’s 2022 rate was 613 exposures per 100,000 population served by and reported to poison centers. It also described an average of 5,657 human-exposure cases per day, or one new human-exposure encounter every 15.3 seconds; these are report-derived averages and do not mean events occurred evenly over time.
- Total NPDS encounters fell 12.9%, from 2,851,166 in 2021 to 2,483,183 in 2022, but this broader total includes human, animal, information and confirmed nonexposure records.
- Human exposure cases increased 0.764% in 2022 compared with 2021 under the annual report’s locked NPDS case definitions.
These categories should not be treated as interchangeable. Accidental, unintentional, therapeutic error, misuse and drug overdose each use different definitions, and poison-center reporting misses events never brought to a participating center.
Unintentional Poisoning Statistics by Age, Sex and Setting
Age differences are pronounced in poison-center reporting. Children younger than 3 years accounted for 28.7% of human exposure cases in 2022, while children age 5 or younger accounted for 40.2%.
| Population, United States, 2022 | Reported exposure rate per 100,000 |
|---|---|
| Children age 1 | 6,954 |
| Children age 2 | 6,556 |
| Children ages 6–12 | 480 |
| Teenagers ages 13–19 | 609 |
| Adults age 20 and older | 349 |
The one-year-old and two-year-old rates are poison-center reporting rates, not a census of all exposures. The age-group figures and the 28.7% and 40.2% shares come from the 2022 Annual Report of the National Poison Data System (NPDS).
Location data also point strongly toward domestic settings:
- A residence was the caller location in 68.1% of reports in 2022, although caller location is not necessarily the exposure site.
- A residence was the exposure location in 92.5% of reported human exposures.
- Workplaces accounted for 1.93% of exposure locations, and schools accounted for 1.49%.
Ingestion was the route in 82.7% of human exposure cases, followed by inhalation or nasal exposure at 7.64% and dermal exposure at 6.85%. Cases can have more than one route, so these percentages should not be added as mutually exclusive categories.
Drug Poisoning Statistics and Therapeutic Errors
Medication mistakes form a substantial part of unintentional poison-center activity. U.S. poison centers reported 331,539 therapeutic-error cases in 2022, but this is not a count of every medication error in the population.
| Therapeutic-error scenario, United States, 2022 | Share of cases |
|---|---|
| Inadvertent double-dosing | 30.8% |
| Other incorrect doses | 16.4% |
| Taking or giving the wrong medication | 15.0% |
| Doses taken or given too close together | 11.1% |
| Exposure to someone else’s medication | 8.47% |
These scenario shares were reported in the 2022 Annual Report of the National Poison Data System (NPDS). They describe reported therapeutic errors rather than all accidental poisonings involving drugs.
Single-substance cases made up 87.3% of reported human exposures in 2022. Among those cases, 22.7% of pharmaceutical exposures were intentional compared with 4.35% of nonpharmaceutical exposures, while health-care-facility treatment occurred in 33.2% of pharmaceutical exposures versus 17.6% of nonpharmaceutical exposures.
The same report recorded 1,627 single-substance exposure-related fatal cases, with pharmaceuticals accounting for 78.2%. It recorded 1,491 exposure-related fatalities after excluding indirect-death reports under the report’s stated criteria.
Chronicity provides another important distinction. Acute exposures, defined by NPDS as occurring over 8 hours or less, represented 84.4% of human exposures; chronic exposures represented 2.61%, or 53,938 cases; and acute-on-chronic exposures represented 11.1%, or 229,159 cases.
Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Statistics and Severe Outcomes
Carbon monoxide (CO) data combine several U.S. systems with different geographic coverage. The CDC report Morbidity and Mortality of Unintentional Carbon Monoxide Poisoning: United States 2005 to 2018 reported annual rates during 2005–2018 of 39.5 poison-center exposure calls per million people, 56.5 emergency-department visits per million, 7.3 hospitalizations per million and 3.3 deaths per million.
The emergency-department rate came from 17 states, and the hospitalization rate came from 26 states, so those figures should not be read as fully national counts. The report’s scope concerns unintentional, non-fire CO poisoning.
Age-specific measures show different patterns by outcome:
- Children ages 0–9 had the highest poison-center CO exposure-call rate, at 54.1 per million.
- Children ages 0–9 had the highest CO emergency-department visit rate, at 70.5 per million across the 17-state ED dataset.
- Adults older than 80 had the highest CO hospitalization rate, at 20.2 per million across the 26-state hospitalization dataset.
- Adults older than 80 had the highest CO death rate, at 9.9 per million in U.S. death-certificate data.
The differing high-rate age groups illustrate why exposure calls, ED visits, hospitalizations and deaths should be presented as separate measures rather than combined into one severity scale.
Child and Household-Product Poisoning Data
Children and household products appear in several narrower data sources, but the populations and years differ. A peer-reviewed study using the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s NEISS data estimated that unintentional product-related poisonings treated in U.S. hospital EDs in 2004 involved children younger than 5 years; the source record does not expose the full estimate in its abstract.
The PubMed record, Unintentional child poisonings treated in United States hospital emergency departments, describes NEISS as a national probability sample. Its findings therefore represent a national estimate for the specified child population and year, not a complete administrative count.
Accidental poisonous-mushroom ingestion is another narrow household and food-related subtype. The CDC report Health Care Utilization and Outcomes Associated with Accidental Poisonous Mushroom Ingestions — United States, 2016–2018 estimated 1,328 ED visits and 100 hospitalizations during 2016 in the United States.
The mushroom figures are estimates from health-care utilization data and should not be generalized to all accidental poisoning. They also describe a specific ingestion subtype rather than every household-product exposure.
Accidental Poisoning Outcomes: Emergency Care, Hospitalization and Death
Drug-poisoning outcomes provide the longest trend in the supplied data, but drug overdose remains a subset of all poisoning. The CDC’s Drug Overdose Deaths in the United States, 2002–2022 reported that the age-adjusted drug-overdose death rate rose from 8.2 per 100,000 in 2002 to 32.6 per 100,000 in 2022, standardized to the 2000 U.S. population.
In 2022, 92.3% of U.S. drug-overdose deaths were classified as unintentional, 4.5% as suicides and 3.0% as having undetermined intent. Synthetic-opioid overdose deaths increased 4.1%, from 21.8 to 22.7 per 100,000, between 2021 and 2022; this is a drug-specific subset covering synthetic opioids other than methadone.
Earlier emergency-care estimates show the scale of drug poisoning before that 2022 mortality measure:
- U.S. emergency departments averaged an estimated 1.1 million drug-poisoning visits per year during 2008–2011.
- The estimated drug-poisoning ED visit rate during 2008–2011 was 35.4 per 10,000 persons.
These estimates come from the CDC’s Drug-poisoning deaths in the United States, 1980–2013, using NHAMCS data. Drug poisoning is broader than accidental poisoning in some respects because the survey includes intent categories as defined by the source.
Acetaminophen-related hospitalization data show why condition-specific outcomes need their own labels. A peer-reviewed study, Trends in rates of acetaminophen-related adverse events in the United States, estimated that among acetaminophen-related hospitalizations during 2008–2012, 16% were unintentional, 67% intentional and 17% other or unspecified.
- An estimated 3.2% of acetaminophen-related hospitalizations had both poisoning and liver-toxicity diagnoses and were classified as accidental during 2008–2012.
- About 1.2% of acetaminophen-poisoning hospitalizations resulted in in-hospital death during 2008–2012.
- In the study, in-hospital mortality was about 0.3% for accidental acetaminophen poisonings.
- Adults ages 18–44 represented 61% of acetaminophen-related hospitalizations during 2008–2012.
- Female patients represented 69% of acetaminophen-related hospitalizations during 2008–2012.
These acetaminophen findings are study-specific estimates of hospitalization populations and outcomes, not a general prevalence estimate for accidental poisoning. Together with poison-center, ED and death-certificate measures, they show why any comparison must preserve the source’s definition, geography, period and outcome.