Plant Poisoning

Each year over 100,000 exposures to toxic plants are reported to poison centers throughout the United States. Most of these exposures are of minimal toxicity largely because of the fact that they involve pediatric ingestions, which are of low quantity. The more serious poisonings usually involve adults who have either mistaken a plant as edible or have deliberately ingested the plant to derive perceived medicinal or toxic properties. The plants within this manuscript have been chosen because they have been documented to cause fatalities or account for emergency medicine visits. In this discussion, plants are grouped by their toxins rather than on the basis of their taxonomy.