Nell Darnel

part of this is because the USAmerican birth rates have slowed, and the number 1 culprit for why you'd call poison control is kids under 5 put shit in their mouths all the time

but part of it is BECAUSE people are turning to the internet first

and you don't have to! poison control is FREE and available in EVERY US STATE AND TERRITORY

they are staffed 24/7 365 days a year! they do everything they can to minimize wait times and they have an ENORMOUS database of medications, household cleaners, chemicals, pesticides, and MORE! and not only information on JUST those things, but how they interact with other things! they can even give you advice on if your pet ingests something they shouldn't!

but poison control isn't federally funded! they're a frankenstein mishmash of state funded, federally funded, and a couple of other weird ones (like organizations helping with funding) just for flavor. poison control NEEDS you to be politically aware. keep a finger on local and state politics; if your state is voting to shut down their poison control center, make sure your reps hear about how pissed you are!

poison control saves lives, but even more than that, it keeps people out of emergency rooms and walk-ins when they don't have to be. when Louisiana closed its PCC in 1988, people who called the PCC hotline were instructed to call their local hospital instead. the number of medically-treated poisonings rose by 42%...meaning ERs and walk-ins were flooded with people who'd taken, say, one extra pill of ibuprofen by accident, or got a bit of rubbing alcohol in their mouth, or got their dog's flea medicine on their skin. stuff that was SCARY, sure...but wouldn't have needed medical care at all if there had just been someone to tell those people you can just wash your mouth out, or wash your skin, or refrain from taking any more ibuprofen for at least 24 hours!

Pretty pink skies ahead 🩷🩷🩷

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Resources From The Leftist Feminist Philosopher

Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them.

Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.

Keep a list of sites you never heard of!

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.