LULU MILLER: Hello, it's Lulu. You know that expression, "Inside every person, there are two wolves fighting. One of them feeds on darkness and despair, and the other one feeds on light and hope, and the one that will win is the one you feed more." What I love about this next story, which is a rerun, is that the reporter in this has two wolves inside her. One is a very worrying mother and the other one is a very curious reporter. And she feeds both of them. She just feeds them both, and what results is this lovely story that takes you through a trap door in American society to a secret room where a bunch of MacGyver-y smart people are holding things together for anyone who happens to call them. That's all I'm gonna say. Again, this is an older episode, a rerun. I think it was about seven years ago. So sit back, relax and let's go.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Uh, hello?

BRENNA FARRELL: Hello, Jad. [laughs]

JAD: Brenna Farrell! How the hell are you?

BRENNA: Oh my God. Uh, great! [laughs]

JAD: [laughs] Wow!

BRENNA: I feel like I'm literally talking to another world.

JAD: I'm Jad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today, we are reconnecting with an old producer of ours, Brenna Farrell.

BRENNA: Yeah. Past life.

ROBERT: Who, since leaving Radiolab, she's been busy with work.

BRENNA: Mm-hmm.

JAD: But also ...

BRENNA: Raising two kids is crazy hard.

JAD: ... with family.

BRENNA: I'm just trying to, like, take my vitamins and, like, exist on a low grade panic attack.

JAD: [laughs]

BRENNA: All day.

ROBERT: Well, I guess we should start by, let's just try to recall, like, what it was that's—I don't even know how you bumped in—like, you don't normally ...

BRENNA: Okay, so back in 2015, my husband Nick and I were in our tiny apartment back in Brooklyn, and we were new parents. Our son, Marty, was 18 months old at the time, and one morning, I think it was about 5:00 am, like, still dark, Marty woke up and he was just, you know, crying, crying, crying. And so I tapped my husband. It was his turn to get up early and go get Marty. So he got out of bed. I fell right back to sleep.

BRENNA: And the next thing I knew, it was like, felt somebody tapping me and I sort of rolled over in my bed and there was just this little person looking up at me, covered in this greasy stuff. All over his face was shiny, and he was laughing and he held up in his hand this giant jar of diaper ointment, this special medicated stuff that we had bought just that last week. And I just thought, "Oh my God. He just ate all this medicine, and I have no idea how much he ate."

BRENNA: And I look around, and my husband who had gotten up with him, changed his diaper and, like, put him down on the floor to play, had—because he was exhausted—fallen asleep in the chair while watching him. So I just flung myself to the edge of the bed, and I grabbed Marty in one arm and started frantically searching the label.

JAD: Which was filled with words like "petrolatum," "ceresin," "panthenol," "glycerin," "bisabolol." But Brenna says she didn't register any of those words, because right underneath that list of ingredients ...

BRENNA: I just saw this bold type that said, "If swallowed, call your doctor or poison control center immediately." And so I'm clutching my son and I'm clutching this jar, and then I yelled to my husband to wake him up and I'm like, "I need you to find the number and call poison control while I hold Marty." And so Nick snaps into action.

JAD: Leaps off the chair into the other room.

BRENNA: So he can make the call.

JAD: And Brenna is left sitting there on the bed holding her 18-month-old son, who is about to—what, throw up? Pass out? Die? She's not sure.

BRENNA: Like, have you ever felt that hollow feeling where, like, your whole chest just drops, and you just—it's like, it feels like missing a step. You're just like, you're just utterly sick, and then just, like, all sweaty up on my temple. So I'm sitting on the edge of our bed. Marty's in my lap, and I'm eagle-eye watching for, like, whatever's about to start happening to him. And I had always heard that, like, you have your mother's instinct or whatever that is and, like, moms know best and moms can tell when something's wrong with their kid and, like, sometimes maybe that's true, but for me ...

ROBERT: Brenna says she just froze.

BRENNA: I was imagining, like, this huge, like, glop of ointment has worked its way down your esophagus, and now what is it doing to your stomach lining? And what's gonna happen when it—like, I was just, like—and I can't take it back. Like, what do I do? So Nick has gone to the next room, and I hear that he's on the phone with someone. And then just moments later, he came back out and he said, "Well, that was the most pleasant phone call I've had in ages." There he was, completely calm, kind of like smiling at me in the doorway, and I'm just still hunched over the bed, like, hanging on to Marty thinking, "What is going on?" So Nick straightened up and then went into, like, "Oh, okay. Here's what happened. I called. They immediately picked up ..."

JAD: Brenna says that Nick told her he talked to this man. The guy asked him super matter of fact how much Marty weighed. Nick told him 20 pounds or whatever. He asked then what brand of diaper ointment did Marty eat? Nick told him the brand. And then the guy did a little mental math and said, "Your child's gonna be fine."

BRENNA: Totally fine. This was probably not a big deal at all. It was really common.

ROBERT: No vomiting, no—no nothing?

BRENNA: Nope. He was like, just like a slippery little piglet at that point. So I cleaned him up and then, you know, let him play. But for the rest of the day, I just kept thinking, "What the hell is poison control? I honestly didn't think we still lived in a world where you could just call a hotline, like, get on the telephone and talk to a live human who somehow knows everything about this one specific brand of diaper ointment and then bam, like, 45 seconds later this full-blown crisis in my mind was just gone. And then I—you know, I just was having this weird moment of, like, there's this invisible network out there that was just kind of primed and waiting to help. Who are these people? So a few months later, I'm totally obsessed with Poison Control ...

BRENNA: Check, check, check.

BRENNA: ... and I ended up in a skyscraper in downtown Chicago. Up 19 floors, down these four twisty-turny corridors to the oldest poison control center in America.

BRENNA: We're here.

BRENNA: When I got there ...

CAROL: You know, our staff wishes there was some natural light.

BRENNA: ... Carol, the senior director, took me on a tour.

BRENNA: It's a lot smaller than I would've expected.

CAROL: You can say it's a dump.

BRENNA: No, it's not a dump. But it definitely is an office. [laughs]

CAROL: [laughs]

BRENNA: It was—you know, I think I was expecting, like, just banks of, like, high tech, gleaming computers and instead ...

CAROL: That phone hasn't worked in at least five years, but it's still there.

BRENNA: It was this narrow office with gray carpet.

CAROL: We have a crusty mushroom poster up there.

BRENNA: Gray cubicles.

CAROL: I don't know whose Cubs hat that is, but it's been here for a while.

BRENNA: The place kinda reminded me of, like, a basement college computer lab, you know, like, where all the machines are kind of still running Windows 95 or something like that. And sitting in front of those computers ...

ERIN: Poison Center.

BRENNA: ... were the poison specialists.

ERIN: I'm the snakebite person. I love handling snakebite calls.

BRENNA: There's Erin, who's into snakes.

ERIN: Like the little old lady who's, like, working in her backyard and there was a snake and she chops off its head with a shovel, and then she brings the snake head into the ER to show them what bit her.

BRENNA: And there's Connie.

CONNIE: I'm sort of the go-to person for mushrooms is how I look at it.

BRENNA: She takes mushroom calls even when she's on vacation.

BRENNA: Is that true?

CONNIE: Yes. [laughs]

CAROL: And she gets excited about it.

BRENNA: There's Cindy, who used to work in the ER.

CINDY: I'm a nurse by background.

BRENNA: There's Jessica.

JESSICA: Yeah, I take the home calls.

BRENNA: There's Art.

ART: I'm interested in all of it. It's all fun.

BRENNA: And then ...

CAROL: Tony? Brenna's here.

BRENNA: ... there's Tony.

TONY BURDA: Hello.

BRENNA: Hi, Tony. How's it going?

TONY BURDA: Hi.

BRENNA: So good to meet you.

BRENNA: He's the expert in everything.

[phone rings]

TONY BURDA: Illinois Poison Center.

ART: I'm ringing. Okay.

JESSICA: Illinois Poison Center.

BRENNA: And while I was there, the stream of calls, it was just non-stop.

JESSICA: All right. Bye-bye.

BRENNA: As soon as one of them would hang up the phone ...

ERIN: Poison Center.

JESSICA: Illinois Poison Center.

BRENNA: ... another call would come in.

JESSICA: He's five? Normally healthy? Okay, gently wipe off his lips with a little warm water on a washcloth. Give him something to drink.

BRENNA: They all told me that in order to work here you need a background in medicine, special training in toxicology on top of that, it helps to have a good memory, good math skills, but, you know, more importantly, what you really need is to be able to stay ...

TONY BURDA: Calm.

BRENNA: ... calm.

TONY BURDA: I usually tell people they're gonna be overwhelmed by the first three months.

CONNIE: Poison Center.

BRENNA: Because sometimes the calls, you know ...

JESSICA: Oh, a glow stick is not going to be a problem.

BRENNA: ... they're adorable.

CINDY: Oh gosh.

BRENNA: But other times ...

CINDY: Oh boy.

BRENNA: ... they're like this.

CINDY: He has a temperature of 104.

BRENNA: This is an ER call.

CINDY: What was his sugar again?

BRENNA: A hospital was calling about a male patient who had been found unconscious.

CINDY: Completely sweaty, diaphoretic at home. So the medics are assessing him. His blood sugar was 40. His Tylenol is 372. His pupils, she said, are bouncing all over the place. I don't know what that means.

BRENNA: After she hung up, I asked Cindy if this was a self-harm call.

CINDY: It's believed to be, yes. She was saying that his wife just died of cancer. Yeah.

BRENNA: Is that somewhat rare, to get one that serious?

CINDY: No, not at all. We get them all the time. At least, you know ...

[phone rings]

CINDY: Poison Center. Can you spell that? Can you spell the name of that drug? And how many milligrams did you say?

BRENNA: I ended up spending about 12 hours there that day, and if you sit in a poison control center that long you just ...

ART: Poison Center.

BRENNA: ... these calls are washing over. They're just coming and coming and coming.

CINDY: Poison Center.

BRENNA: You start to feel just kind of ...

ART: How's your child doing?

BRENNA: ... overwhelmed by the fact that every single time the phone rings ...

ART: How many times did she vomit?

BRENNA: ... there's somebody on the other side of the line, and they're in a moment of uncertainty ...

ART: Okay.

BRENNA: ... or panic ...

CINDY: Now when did she take the Tylenol overdose?

BRENNA: ... or crisis.

CINDY: This could be pretty serious.

BRENNA: And the scale of that is just kind of shocking.

CAROL: We manage 80,000 calls a year out of this room.

BRENNA: And that's just this one center. That's just Chicago. If you take the poison centers all across the country, they handle almost three million cases a year. So you get a call like mine—or much worse—about every 14 seconds or so.

JAD: Whoa!

CAROL: You know, this is a very poisonous planet.

BRENNA: And thinking about just how many of us are bumping into these things that we think might be poisoning us ...

CAROL: Arsenic, mercury ...

BRENNA: ... or that are poisoning us ...

CAROL: Gold is poisonous to some extent. Silver not so poisonous, but it'll turn you blue.

BRENNA: ... I decided to call up Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and poison enthusiast.

DEBORAH BLUM: I love poison, it's true. [laughs]

BRENNA: Even wrote a book called The Poisoner's Handbook.

DEBORAH BLUM: Yeah, my husband worries about that a lot.

BRENNA: [laughs]

DEBORAH BLUM: In fact, he has not let me pour him a cup of coffee for the last six years since my book came out.

BRENNA: Are you—are you serious? He really won't?

DEBORAH BLUM: [laughs] No, seriously. He's always like, "Oh, I'll get it."

BRENNA: So Deborah says it helps to kind of think of poison control as part of this much larger back and forth, kind of a dance, an evolving dance that we've been doing with our poisonous planet for thousands of years.

DEBORAH BLUM: We've been dancing with them in different ways for a very long time. If you go back and look at the hieroglyphics in Egypt, there's actually references to death by peach.

BRENNA: Hmm.

DEBORAH BLUM: And that refers to cyanide poisoning because cyanides are the primary poison in the pits of peaches and plums.

ROBERT: Death by peach is actually written in a wall of a temple somewhere, or a tomb?

DEBORAH BLUM: That's exactly right.

BRENNA: And Deborah says if you go back to the beginning of that dance, you'll find that like with so many things, it starts with murder. Because we humans first got really interested in poisons when we realized we could use them to kill each other.

DEBORAH BLUM: And one of my favorite examples is actually arsenic.

BRENNA: Which, in early 19th-century Europe was by all accounts ...

DEBORAH BLUM: The perfect homicidal poison.

BRENNA: It was tasteless, it was odorless.

DEBORAH BLUM: You could put it into vanilla pudding or oatmeal.

BRENNA: It mimicked a natural illness.

DEBORAH BLUM: Gee, it kinda looked like they had a bad gastroenteritis.

BRENNA: And at the time we had no way of detecting it.

DEBORAH BLUM: Literally, when we come into the 19th century, science has not figured out a way to detect a single poison in a corpse.

ROBERT: Well, so what ruined this perfect murder?

DEBORAH BLUM: Well, there was a chemist in Britain named James Marsh who worked out this incredibly—it's, I mean, by the standards today, primitive test which involved mincing up the tissue from the dead person and adding some acid, and heating it up and distilling it. And then as this vapor comes out, it cools onto glass. And if there was any arsenic in the original tissue, that arsenic formed tiny dark crystals, and you got a sort of blackish silver mirror forming over the glass.

ROBERT: Oh!

DEBORAH BLUM: And that was actually the first great test in forensic toxicology, the Marsh test.

BRENNA: This is sort of the moment, Deborah says, that modern science joined our dance with poison, because ...

DEBORAH BLUM: As you see the rise of industrial chemistry, and our ability to synthesize cyanide and strychnine and some of these amazingly toxic elements, you also see people's realization of how useful they are.

MATT KIELTY: Man, people are so cool around here. Are we in Soho?

ANNIE MCEWEN: We're in West Soho.

MATT: West Soho.

BRENNA: What started happening was at the beginning of the 20th century, there were all these new cleaning products hitting the market designed to kill germs, and pharmaceutical products designed to kill headaches or whatever. And suddenly, all these poisons that used to just be out there in nature were in our homes.

ROBERT: Or in the drugstore aisle, for example.

MATT: Did you see the fun sunglasses?

ANNIE: Where?

MATT: They're right over here.

ROBERT: Here are our producers Annie McEwen and Matt Kielty taking a jaunt ...

ANNIE: Okay, here we are in Hudson Pharmacy.

ROBERT: ... on our time, on Tuesday afternoon—this is during working hours ...

MATT: Man, they only got the weird Dorito flavors.

ANNIE: Come on.

ROBERT: ... to the local drugstore.

ANNIE: Cleaning aisle. Wow! So ...

MATT: Oh my!

ANNIE: Drano. It's at the bottom of the shelf, easy for kids to reach. Now let's read the ingredients.

MATT: Contains sodium hypochlorite, sodium hydroxide and sodium silicate.

ANNIE: Okay. Let me see one second. Quick check online. Sodium hydroxide. According to Wikipedia, it's used to digest tissues. Say there's, like, roadkill in a landfill, they will put the roadkill in a sealed container with sodium hydroxide and water.

MATT: Oh right. It's like Breaking Bad.

ANNIE: Yeah, and the body turns into a liquid with coffee-like appearance, apparently.

MATT: Turns people into coffee.

ANNIE: It, like, makes people into coffee. Yeah.

MATT: Okay.

ANNIE: A little higher on the shelf ...

MATT: Ah, everybody's favorite childhood cartoon.

ANNIE: Mr. Clean, meadows and rain scent.

MATT: Oh, yeah.

ANNIE: Same thing.

MATT: Sodium hydroxide.

ANNIE: Coffee people. Wait, don't open it. Don't open it. It's not—if you open it you have to buy it.

MATT: No.

ANNIE: [laughs]

MATT: [laughs]

ANNIE: Yes. Look!

MATT: What's this thing? This opens.

ANNIE: Nope. There's Windex. I see Windex. Oh, this one is just called "Ammonia."

MATT: [laughs]

ANNIE: If you mix ammonia and bleach, what happens? A poisonous gas results.

MATT: [laughs] Whoa.

ANNIE: It also occurs naturally in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn.

MATT: That's impressive.

ANNIE: Next one. This little gray bottle up on the highest shelf.

MATT: Goddard's Brass and Copper Polish.

ANNIE: A brass and copper polish.

MATT: Contains 2-butoxyethanol.

ANNIE: It has a sweet, ether-like odor.

MATT: Here, I'm gonna pop this. Oh!

ANNIE: Did you just open it and smell it?

MATT: Oh, it said harmful if inhaled. [laughs]

ANNIE: Oh, Matt! Okay, well it says it can cause adrenal tumors in animals. It's carcinogenic in rodents.

MATT: Jesus Christ! Well, I hope I didn't smell too much of it.

ANNIE: Matt!

MATT: Let's just get out of here.

ANNIE: You don't wanna get some chips?

MATT: No.

ANNIE: All right.

DEBORAH BLUM: We're very comfortable with the fact that we walk down the grocery store aisle or open up the medicine chest, and we're surrounded by these different—you know, in pill form or liquid form or spray form or whatever, but these different compounds that actually are dangerous. We're used to that. We live with that, right?

BRENNA: Wow, snakes.

BRENNA: Which brings us to a guy.

BRENNA: Oh, and there's a plaque for Louis Gdalman.

BRENNA: Actually, I saw this plaque dedicated to him on the wall at the poison center in Chicago.

BRENNA: "In appreciation of the initiative and devoted service of Louis Gdalman, RPH, founder of the Poison and Drug Information Center.

BRENNA: Anyway, a guy named Louis Gdalman.

KATHRYN GDALMAN: Louis Gdalman, who was a brilliant scientist in the state of Illinois.

BRENNA: Louis passed away back in 1995, but his wife Kathryn ...

KATHRYN GDALMAN: Yes.

BRENNA: ... is still very much alive.

KATHRYN GDALMAN: Absolutely.

BRENNA: She's 98 now, but she met Louis back when she was a 20-year-old nurse working in St. Luke's Hospital in Chicago.

KATHRYN GDALMAN: It was 1940, and he was a pharmacist in the hospital. And everybody knew Lou, and we all loved him and I was the lucky one. I caught him. [laughs]

BRENNA: Louis was sort of a shorter man, dark hair, big dark eyebrows.

KATHRYN GDALMAN: And he had a great personality and he would take care of everything that came along.

BRENNA: Friendly, but when it came to his work, he took it very seriously.

KATHRYN GDALMAN: The pharmacy was directly across the hall from the emergency room.

BRENNA: And so what started happening is Gdalman noticed this trend. Like, just to back up, this is the 1940s, and doctors are totally winning against infectious diseases. And what that meant was that, as far as the public was concerned, keeping your family healthy and germ free is a big deal. And that meant keeping your home ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: So clean.]

BRENNA: ... super ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: Gleaming clean.]

BRENNA: ... duper ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: So white.]

BRENNA: ... clean.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: It really looks clean, doesn't it?]

BRENNA: And at the same time ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: [singing] Use Ajax.]

BRENNA: ... there's just this explosion of new cleaning products coming into the market.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: Bab-o cleans your sink brighter than any other cleanser in the world.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: Johnson's Jubilee.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: New Blue Cheer. Great for dishes as well as laundry.]

BRENNA: So our kitchen cabinets and cupboards under the bathroom sink ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: Deep cleaning Oxidol.]

BRENNA: ... was getting, like, filled up with all of these things. Like, strong smelling powders and liquids ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: Bab-o.]

BRENNA: ... and brightly colored bottles and boxes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: Of all leading cleaners, Mr. Clean is now the most powerful ever put into a bottle.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: Ooh, and it smells good too!]

BRENNA: And getting back to Louis, what he began to notice was that more and more these doctors were coming across the hall to his pharmacy. Like, first one, and then more and more and, you know, they were saying, like, "Hey, we've got this kid over in the ER. He just got into this new cleaning stuff and we have no idea what's in it. Can you help us?"

KATHRYN GDALMAN: So the interns and residents in the emergency room would naturally come across the hall to see Lou, and Lou helped them find out what the child had taken.

BRENNA: For example, if a child had swallowed Ajax ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: Use Ajax! Boom boom.]

BRENNA: That meant he'd actually eaten ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: Boom boom.]

BRENNA: ... sodium carbonate and sodium dodecylbenzene sulfinate, which could mean nausea, diarrhea or vomiting.

KATHRYN GDALMAN: And Lou used to keep cards on every patient that he saw.

BRENNA: So with each new product that was brought into the emergency room, Lou would write up a new card. White Sail Bleach: sodium hypocholoride, chest pain, vomiting.]

KATHRYN GDALMAN: Lou decided this was a thing that was very needed.

BRENNA: Because by the 1950s, there were over 250,000 different trade name substances on the market. And so doctors, they just couldn't keep up. And so Lou's stack of cards, it grew taller and taller and taller, and pretty soon word got out. Docs across the country would hear that there's this guy in Chicago who gives out help on poisoning cases. And so many calls were coming in at all hours of the day and night, eventually Gdalman just started telling the switchboard operators they could go ahead and transfer the call to his home.

KATHRYN GDALMAN: We would get calls from all the different little emergency rooms in the hospitals in the state.

ROBERT: And what was—what's it like—once you're doing this, then it seems to me that you don't really have normal hours, because emergencies will take place whenever they take place. So ...

KATHRYN GDALMAN: Yes.

ROBERT: ... how did, what was he gonna be on call 24 hours a day, or ...

KATHRYN GDALMAN: Yes.

ROBERT: Really?

KATHRYN GDALMAN: Yes. Yes, he was. We would get calls in the middle of the night, or even during dinner time.

ROBERT: So what happens if, you know, he's in the tub and you're cooking dinner and the phone rings?

KATHRYN GDALMAN: I would take the phone to him in the tub. [laughs] And that's the way it started.

BRENNA: And eventually, Lou's little operation became the first poison control center in the United States in 1953 in Chicago.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: [singing] 1-800-222-1222, 1-800-222-1222. If you think it might be poison then the first thing you should do is call 1-800-222-1222. Poison is the kind of thing you're not supposed to touch. Old prescriptions, cleaning stuff or spider bites and such. If you swallowed somethin' bad or think you took too much, call the poison control center hotline, we're the people you can trust.]

JAD: Two, one, Jad.

ROBERT: Robert.

JAD: Radiolab.

ROBERT: So we are back with reporter Brenna Farrell, who is continuing to inquire into things poisonous.

JAD: And before the break, we just learned about Louis Gdalman who started the oldest poison control center in the country back in 1953 in Chicago.

BRENNA: Yeah. And so today, now we have 55 poison control centers all across the country, and it's one phone number that anyone anywhere in the US can call whenever they need help.

[phone ringing]

ART: Poison Center.

BRENNA: Are there certain times of day? Like, is there a rhythm to the day, generally?

TONY BURDA: The usual pattern. It's busy in the morning, you know, kids are getting ready for school and the parents are getting ready for work.

JESSICA: People brushing their teeth with muscle rub cream, kids drinking a little mouthwash, eating some sunscreen, eating some old mayonnaise.

TONY BURDA: Double doses in the morning. You know, each parent will give the kid the ADHD medication, or—and then the mid-afternoon kind of tapers down a little bit.

CINDY: 'Til like four or five is the slowest.

JESSICA: And then ...

CINDY: The evenings.

TONY BURDA: The busiest time of the day overall is like between 6:00 pm and 10:00 pm.

JESSICA: And it's people coming home from work, trying to get dinner.

CINDY: Super glue instead of eye drops. Super glue instead of lip gloss.

TONY BURDA: People take the dog's or cat's medicine by mistake instead of their normal medication.

BRENNA: [laughs] Oh, no. Really?

TONY BURDA: Yeah. That's a frequent scenario.

JESSICA: At night, it gets to be with adults.

ERIN: I have—literally, I have a list here of all the things that have been used instead of lube.

CONNIE: It's just busy. It's, you know, just the hectic schedule that we're living in right now.

BRENNA: And Gdalman's old stack of cards, that's become this huge database that's tracking, like, in real time these things that are cropping up.

[NEWS CLIP: An outbreak of Salmonella that may have made 22 people sick already.]

BRENNA: Whether it's a Salmonella outbreak or, like ...

[NEWS CLIP: The last 11 deaths appear to be connected to heroin being sold in Western New York that's laced with fentanyl.]

BRENNA: ... a weird drug reaction that people are having, or maybe it's a new product that's unexpectedly dangerous.

[NEWS CLIP: ... popular laundry detergent pods that look like candy, now they are being linked to a tragic death of a child.]

BRENNA: They can see that in real time, and let health officials or whoever else know about it.

JAD: Wow.

BRENNA: Which is pretty cool, but I mean, honestly just selfishly, thinking about myself as a mom, coming out of the trip to poison control I remember writing down this feeling of, like, you know, what if I just approached all the scary decisions in my life the way that poison control did? Like, kind of thinking, like, what would poison control do? Like, it just—it felt like such a relief to be experiencing ...

CINDY: It was phenobarbital 64.8 milligram tablet. And how much does she weigh?

BRENNA: ... like, this super rational place. Like, it was just completely rational.

CINDY: And when did it happen? How long ago?

BRENNA: We have this data, we're gonna ...

ART: What's the name of the product?

BRENNA: ... take these questions from you ...

CINDY: 9:25. Let me see if this is even gonna be a problem.

BRENNA: ... and then we're gonna tell you this is what we think is gonna happen.

TONY BURDA: She doesn't have any stomach pain now, she's awake.

BRENNA: And they'll let you make a decision, or they'll tell you, like, straight up, don't worry about it.

TONY BURDA: Yeah, I think she's gonna be a-okay for—from here on out.

CINDY: And then take it again but you will be okay. Okay?

BRENNA: It just felt like it stripped away a lot of the—like, the guilt and the anxiety and the, like, should I do this?

JAD: Yeah.

BRENNA: And politics and all those other things that often swirl around even seemingly, to me, innocuous questions about how do I keep this person, this little person safe and healthy? There's all this stuff swirling around it, and they just—we didn't have to get into any of that.

JAD: That still remains for me the most interesting part of this, is the—the idea that we're just supposed to know things. Like, you know, I talk about this with my dad. I mean, there was this time in medicine when it was all about the doctor in the white coat. It was this paternalistic thing, doctor knows best. And no one wants to go back there but there was something emotionally clean about that, whereas now, we—we have all the information. It's right there. This is hand in hand with the rise of the internet. And so increasingly we're expected to be our own experts, and it's usually presented as this sort of simple idea that information is power. And it isn't power. I mean it is, but it's also paralysis.

BRENNA: Yeah. I actually had a rule where I wouldn't—I would only let Nick look things up because I couldn't—like I was not—it started when I was pregnant. I, like, would have a panic attack because there was so many different things. And, like, always the top searches are the ones that, like, you're gonna die.

JAD: Oh yeah. And you—like, you get into the comments field? Oh forget it.

BRENNA: Oh God, right?

JAD: I mean, there's something about when you look at an answer on a screen, and you're just one click away from the exact opposite answer. [laughs]

BRENNA: Yeah.

JAD: And then when you're on the phone with someone, it's just you and that person. Like, there is no other distraction.

BRENNA: Yeah.

JAD: Like, there's something built into the technology that creates exactly the kind of connection you need at that moment.

TONY BURDA: You know, people, when they call you, it's an emergency, they're—they're panicking, and I think half the battle is getting them to settle down and ...

BRENNA: So this is Tony Burda, the know-everything guy we mentioned earlier.

TONY BURDA: Well, I started in February of '81.

BRENNA: He's been that calm voice for 30 years. And while he was in pharmacy school he had an accident.

TONY BURDA: Well, I actually started pharmacy school as a sighted person, but I finished as a blind individual.

JAD: What—what happened?

BRENNA: He—he didn't want to say.

TONY BURDA: Oh, I don't want to dwell on it, but ...

BRENNA: But, like, I was sitting there seeing him doing all of this math and spitting out these numbers ...

TONY BURDA: Receptor sites and half lives and volumes of distribution, and ...

BRENNA: ... which is totally incomprehensible to me. But he told me that he also, like, pretty quickly had discovered early on that there was this whole other part of doing this job.

TONY BURDA: That was in September of '82. Let's see, I would have probably had, like, a year and half of experience at that time. I remember I was sitting in the Poison Center with another pharmacist and we had the news radio AM station on. It was about 10:30 in the morning, it was news—news flash.

[NEWS CLIP: A bizarre and terrifying story today in the Chicago suburbs of Arlington Heights and Elk Grove Village. A 12-year-old girl and two men who were brothers are dead after taking poisoned capsules of extra-strength Tylenol.]

TONY BURDA: Several people died from cyanide that they believe was from Tylenol.

[NEWS CLIP: Five deaths in Chicago, and that number might be changed to six.]

[NEWS CLIP: Six deaths have now been linked to the capsules which are laced with cyanide and linked to ...]

BRENNA: It was this terrifying moment where thousands of people just simultaneously were all thinking, "Oh my God, this thing I brought into my home to make me feel better, it could kill me."

[NEWS CLIP: Today across the country, Tylenol products were being pulled from the shelves.]

BRENNA: The police are, like, driving their cars slowly down the street with loudspeakers being like ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Do not take any Tylenol until further notice.]

BRENNA: ... "Take back your Tylenol."

[NEWS CLIP: Don't take any Tylenol Extra Strength for the time being until you hear otherwise.]

BRENNA: And so, you know, Tony told me he's sitting there hearing these news broadcasts going across the radio, and he just turned to the guy sitting next to him in the poison control center and said ...

TONY BURDA: Holy S. We're gonna—we're gonna get killed.

[phone ringing]

[NEWS CLIP: [woman] Poison Control.]

[NEWS CLIP: [man] Poison Control Center.]

[NEWS CLIP: The phone has been ringing off the hook at Rush Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago.]

TONY BURDA: You know, it was just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Soon as you hung up the phone, you know, the phone rang again.

[NEWS CLIP: We've been receiving calls about once every 15 seconds.]

TONY BURDA: This other pharmacist and I just grabbed the references and tried to make ourselves cyanide experts, you know, real fast.

BRENNA: An interesting thing about this case is that in every single one of these calls that was coming in, you know, someone was terrified, someone was panicked, but they weren't actually in any danger.

[NEWS CLIP: Officials here say if anyone has taken a cyanide-laced Tylenol capsule, they probably wouldn't be able to make it to the phone to call.]

BRENNA: So in some way, this moment, if you think about it, it really kind of highlights the thing that is really at the heart of poison control. The specialists not only were calm but they—they're job was to just reassure. Like, they were letting people know it was gonna be okay. But if you flash forward to now, that's changing. It's—they're getting more calls that are more serious. They're getting calls from hospitals, they're getting calls from people who have taken multiple drugs, and so ...

JAD: And that—does that mean that they're getting less calls from, like, normal people, parents, and that kind of thing?

BRENNA: Yeah, those calls are going down.

JAD: Huh.

BRENNA: And, like, calls overall since, like, the—in the past decade, there have been fewer calls to poison control.

JAD: Do you know why?

BRENNA: My sense is we don't like to make phone calls anymore. Like, people don't—you know, the internet is there, and that's what we're used to and that's easy. And so they are—they just launched this new—like instead of calling, you can go to the website and plug in answers to the questions that they roll through, and it will give you the same answer based on hopefully the same knowledge. But then as a person who's lived through it, I'm like, oh my God, please don't take away that phone call because it—when you're in that panic, the thought of having to sit and type an answer out while you're holding your kid and, like, wondering if you've really screwed up, it's like you're taking away something really valuable that maybe we're not valuing here.

DEBORAH BLUM: I did have this one event when my older son—I've got two sons—was very little. We were living in Sacramento.

JAD: That, by the way, is author Deborah Blum again.

DEBORAH BLUM: And they didn't have fluoridated water, so our doc gave them these tiny, cute—they were really cute—fruit-flavored fluoride pills, the kind of thing you could get a toddler to take. I don't know what we were doing, but somehow we had given him his daily fluoride pill and then like idiots left it on the kitchen counter. And he grabbed it and pretty much inhaled the whole bottle. And I was really freaked. I just didn't know how poisonous that was gonna be and I called poison control.

ROBERT: You did?

DEBORAH BLUM: And—I did. I was like, am I supposed to—what I wanted to know was whether I should panic, right? I mean, he seemed fine. He—it wasn't like he was getting sick in any way, and they were completely non-freaked out about it. [laughs] I was like ...

BRENNA: [laughs] That's their specialty.

DEBORAH BLUM: Yeah. It was like ...

ROBERT: Do you remember that experience? Do you remember hear—did you hear their words or did you hear their tone?

DEBORAH BLUM: It was the tone. They were so calm, and they could tell I was freaked. And—and I can just tell you, I'm standing in the kitchen, we had this phone, my son's by me, I—you know, he can tell I'm freaked but he doesn't really know why I'm freaked. And I sat on the floor. After I talked to them, I just sat down on the floor with him, because I was just so grateful, right?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

DEBORAH BLUM: And I was. And that's what I remember is how grateful I felt.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: Hello? My two-and-a-half-year-old daughter just ate most of the tube of a 0.85-ounce thing of Crest.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: Good afternoon, Poison Control. How may I help you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: Oh, yes. Hi there, I gave my son 12.5 ml of children's Motrin.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: I understand. And what is his weight?"]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: Uh, he is about 25 to 30 pounds, so ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: Good question. Um, 0.243 percent.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: 0.243?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: Mm-hmm.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: How much does the child weigh?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: Um, she weighs—darn it, I think 24 pounds?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: This was a brand new tube that she ate?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: Um, just a tiny bit used, maybe a pea-sized amount used.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: Um, that shouldn't be a problem.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: Terro.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: Terro and ...?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: Terro. T-E-R-R-O.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: Yeah?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: Uh, that's what it says. that's all I can see. It says "Others, terro."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: Does it say anything teracular too, or anything else?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: No, it just says terro. Uh, yeah. Four tubes, 5.Y, or five percentage. It might be percent, I'm not sure.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: Five what?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: 5.Y?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: 5.4, maybe.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: Maybe. Yes. 5.4.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: Yeah, 5.4. That's not a problem.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: No?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: No.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: Oh, thank heaven!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: So give her something to drink and she'll be fine.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: Okay.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: Yes, definitely not even close to the possible toxic dose.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: No, this happens all the time. She should be fine.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: All right, well thank you so much for your help. I appreciate it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: You're welcome. You know, he'll be fine.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: Wow, um, Leti ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: Letitia.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: Is it Letitia? You just put us at ease, and I appreciate you very much.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, operator: Oh we appreciate that too.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: 1-800-222-1222, 1-800-222-1222. If you swallowed something bad or think you took too much, 1-800-222-1222.]

JAD: Calls to poison control are confidential, by the way. We got permission from the callers you heard to use the audio. If you should ever need to call poison control, the number is 1-800-222-1222. And if you text the word POISON to 797979, it'll save the number in your phone.

ROBERT: Deborah Blum's latest book, The Poison Squad, is gonna come out this fall and you can find out more on our website.

JAD: Thank you also to Nick Capodice, Wendy Blair-Stefan, Mariana Moser-Jones, Andrew Perella, Whitney Pennington, Richard Dart and Natalie Wheton. This episode was reported by Brenna Farrell and produced by Annie McEwen with help from Jake Arlow. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: If you think it might be poison and you don't know what to do, call 1-800-222-1222.]

LULU: And update from the future. Lulu again. Marty is now nine, and Brenna said that in just the last year he and his brother have ingested things that required poison control to be called. Anyway, so Brenna's family is doing their part of keeping poison control relevant. Big thanks to her, big thanks to poison control and big thanks to you for listening. Catch you next week with a new one.

[LISTENER: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Amy Pearl, Anna Rascouët-Paz, Alyssa Jeong Perry, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster, with help from Timmy Broderick. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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