The gas is odorless and invisible, which makes it especially sinister. Serious cases of carbon monoxide can result from smoke inhalation amid fires, but common sources of poisoning are faulty or leaking home heating systems. In typical years, roughly 50,000 Americans are poisoned by carbon monoxide and 400 die. "We want to increase awareness of the hidden dangers of carbon monoxide and how quickly it can strike, as it is odorless, colorless and tasteless."
"For 30-plus years, our program has taken care of acutely poisoned patients and seen the unfortunate consequences of carbon monoxide-related injuries, nearly all of which are preventable," said David Lambert, MD, chief of Hyperbaric and Undersea Medicine. Cases have returned to their normal level, but they're still high for a condition that is avoidable with the proper knowledge and equipment. The winter of 2020–21 does appear to have been an outlier. Since we only treat a minority of carbon monoxide poisoning cases, the people with the highest levels of carbon monoxide in their system, we knew many more must have been coming into the emergency department with serious, but lower severities." "That number doubled in 2020, and we saw most during the winter of 2020–2021. "Typically, from 2016 through 2019, we averaged about 36 people in the hyperbaric chamber for carbon monoxide poisoning," said Michael Tom, MD, a doctor in Emergency Medicine on the Hyperbaric Medicine treatment team at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Last winter, Penn's Hyperbaric Medicine team was seeing abnormally high numbers of patients needing the treatment, which is typically only used for the worst cases. This treatment is especially important because it helps reduce potentially significant neurological conditions like seizures, or memory or motor function problems that present similarly to a concussion. But for the land-based, hyperbaric medicine is an important treatment for forcing carbon monoxide gas out of the blood of the most severely poisoned patients.
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