Wellness Wednesday is sponsored by Intermountain Health
In 2024 Intermountain Health treated 168 patients for carbon monoxide poisoning. This largely preventable illness has frustrated doctors encouraging Utahns to take the proper precautions to keep their families safe.
If someone threatened to drop you in the middle of the ocean or to release you into the atmosphere of another planet, you'd be terrified, right?
Well, carbon monoxide turns the safe spaces around you into that ocean or planet.
“Carbon monoxide rids the body of oxygen. Carbon monoxide takes away the oxygen and as we all know, we cannot live without oxygen,” said Dr. Lyndell Weaver, medical director of hyperbaric medicine at LDS Hospital and Intermountain Medical Center.
“I've treated over 2,000 patients in my career poisoned by carbon monoxide, and it's like, really, enough is enough. Why can't we just get people to stop being poisoned? And you know, it's the same thing year after year - the same stories. You would think that with perhaps public awareness, perhaps more modern heating systems and houses, carbon monoxide alarms and detectors. But I'm here to tell you the prevalence just is not changing much,” said Weaver.
That gets frustrating because it's one of those problems that's easy to prevent but difficult to treat and often impossible to cure.
“This is something that should never ever happen, period,” said Weaver.
But since it does happen all too often, doctors are prepared to treat carbon monoxide poisoning to the best of their ability.
“So, in the group they get poisoned, we treat it by first removing the individual from that environment, fresh air, followed by oxygen. And in some what we call hyperbaric oxygen where a patient goes inside a chamber and breathes oxygen under pressure, and then the treatment often continues because if they have brain damage, if they have heart issues, the treatment may be lifelong depending on what's wrong with them,” said Weaver.
So maybe play a trick on yourself. Allow yourself to think pirates will make you walk the plank or aliens will release you on planet Zeldar unless you get inexpensive CO detectors.
“One really needs to have carbon monoxide alarms and detection systems at home, and I would say at their place of work, although often they don't, because they're not legislated to be there.”
Carbon monoxide detectors can be portable if you’d like to take one to work or when you travel. The key is to make sure they are functioning with good batteries.
Click here for simple tips that can help keep your family safe.
