On the afternoon of August 11, the Emergency Department – Saint Paul General Hospital treated a 3-month-old child in a deep coma, pale skin, anemia.
According to the family’s share, 2 days before, the baby had a bowel movement, vomited, stopped feeding, then convulsed. Although he asked about self-medication at home, his family insisted that he only used Nystatin to treat thrush.
By experience, doctors continue to ask if the family has applied pink orange medicine to their children? This is a common folk medicine used to treat thrush in children, but it is less common than it used to be. At that time, the family suddenly remembered that they had used orange medicine for 1 week and stopped taking it for 5 days.
So what are causes of the baby’s poisoning is from using orange medicine? To get the correct answer, the doctors took a pink packet of powder to brush the baby’s tongue for X-ray, the image of the film showed a very strong contrast due to heavy metals.
Thus, it can be confirmed that the baby has lead poisoning due to orange drug use.
The baby’s test results showed that the lead in the child’s blood was 139.83Mg/Dl, many times higher than the allowable threshold and exceeding the threshold causing brain damage. With this patient, lead poisoning has brain damage, if not detected and treated in time, will leave serious injuries and sequelae later. At present, the patient is more awake, has stopped convulsions, is able to suckle, the prognosis is that the treatment time will last for many sessions, even years.
Although there have been many warnings about the risk of lead poisoning in orange medicine of unknown origin, many parents still believe in this “panacea”. Many people believe that orange medicine can help children gain weight, heal common diseases, use it to clean children’s tongue. These mistakes can cause many serious consequences for the baby, parents!
Common signs when children are poisoned: Vomiting, severe diarrhea, abdominal pain, fever… If the parents taking care of the child see these symptoms, they need to take the child to the hospital for a health check immediately.
To prevent poisoning in general and lead poisoning in young children in particular, parents should not arbitrarily buy and use orange medicine of unknown origin to drink and apply. If you accidentally let your child use it, please take your child to a blood lead test for timely treatment if lead poisoning occurs.
Source: General Medicine
