Background: Toxicoepidemiological data from rural areas of developing countries is scarce. Most studies examine admissions to urban referral hospitals and extrapolate to lower level health facilities. The validity of this approach was examined in this work.
Methods: A retrospective review of all poisoning admissions was conducted at the provincial hospital (PH) and six district hospitals (DH) in Mashonaland Central province, Zimbabwe for the period January 1998 to December 1999 (inclusive). Patient records were traced by hand from medical ward registers. Relevant information was collected using a standard data collection tool.
Results: There were 711 poisoning admissions to the DH and 341 to the PH. Case demographic details were similar at both the PH and DH, with a male to female ratio of 1:1 and most cases in the 0-5, 16-20 and 21-25 year age groups. Most admissions resulted from accidental poisoning (>60%) at both levels of care. However, the important causes of admission differed with animal envenomation (especially snakebite) predominating at DH (43.6% of admissions; 99% CI 38.9%-46.5%), whilst pesticide poisoning (26.1%; CI 20.0%-32.2%) predominated at the PH. Pharmaceutical exposures were common at the PH (15.2%; CI 10.2%-20.3%), but not at the DH (3.7%; CI 2.1%-5.1%). Despite this, patient demographics and reasons leading to poisoning were similar for animal, pesticide and pharmaceutical exposures.
Conclusion: Important differences existed between provincial and district poisoning data in Zimbabwe. Caution must be used when using urban referral hospital data to describe prevalence of poisoning in rural areas.