Abstract

EVALUATION OF PARAQUAT POISONING SIDE EFFECTS

Farkhondeh Jamshidi, Ali Hassan Rahmani and Mitra Ekrami*

Abstract

Introduction: Poisoning by pesticides is a public health concern in developing countries. Paraquat is widely used as a means of suicide in third world countries because it is available at very low cost and has low-dose toxicity and ten milliliters of it is fatal. This study is designed to report cases of paraquat poisoning. Material and Method: all cases of paraquat poisoning hospitalized in Razi hospital within the period of early 2004 to late 2014 were studied. Accordingly a checklist included patients’ demographic data (age, gender, location, occupation, educational level, marital status), information on patients’ records (history of a particular disease, history of using paraquat, suicide), information on poisoning (mode of poisoning, type of use, nausea after usage and organ damage) and information on treatment and therapy programs (the interval between the usage and getting to the hospital, interval between the hospitalization and receiving the first hemodialysis, patients’ treatment plan, length of hospitalization, result and complications associated with treatment) that is filled based on the records. In order to analyze the data using descriptive statistics including frequency tables, diagrams and numeric indices the variables will be described. Data analysis will be done by SPSS V 18 software. Results: The symptoms observed in patients were associated with nausea and vomiting, mouth ulcers, sore throat, epigastric pain, respiratory distress and intubation and organ damage that nausea and vomiting was the most common complication. Finally 58 cases (95.1%) of the poisonings led to death and 3 patients (4.9%) were discharged with normal condition. Conclusion: the level of deliberate poisoning with Paraquat is much higher in single men and paraquat has high and fast mortality, thus it is important to train people to forbid them from storing and keeping it away from the vulnerable people.

Keywords: Paraquat, Pesticide, Poisoning Toxicology, Suicide.