21 Nov Australia’s Only Pet Poison Helpline
The Australian Animal Poisons Centre will be the only pet poison helpline in Australia. The service will provide poisoning management advice to pet owners and veterinarians for actual or suspected poisonings, and will be a free service for all Australian pet owners. The team at the Australian Animal Poisons Centre is working hard behind the scenes to launch the service before the end of the year.
The pet poison helpline in Australia will provide rapid, up-to-date and evidence-based advice on the treatment of all types of poisoning. This includes but is not limited to household and industrial chemical exposures, human and veterinary medications, pesticide exposures and bites and stings. Management advice will include comprehensive information on simple first-aid measures, risk assessment, investigations, decontamination procedures, antidotes and patient disposition. The service will be staffed by Specialists in Poisons Information, who are either pharmacists or veterinarians with significant further training and experience in treating poisoning cases. All clinical guidelines for the Australian pet poison helpline will be ratified by a registered and highly experienced Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care Specialist.
The Animal Poisons Centre is also excited to announce the launch of petTOX, an exclusive database which has been custom built for the pet poison helpline. petTOX is a secure, cross-platform database for the recording and reporting of animal poisoning cases. Once live, petTOX will incorporate geocoding technology to provide real-time mapping of poisoning exposures and track patterns of animal poisoning cases across our country. This will be an Australian first and will provide extremely useful data to regulatory bodies, such as the APVMA, and to animal welfare bodies such as the RSPCA.
Whilst we hope that you do not require the services of the Australian Animal Poisons Centre any time soon, mistakes do happen. If you suspect or know that your pet has been poisoned, please call the only pet poison helpline in Australia on 1300 TOX PET (1300 869 738).