They arrived in the night from Lampedusa by helicopter to the emergency room of the Agrigento hospital and their lives were saved thanks to the promptness of the health workers and the administration of an antidote for benzene intoxication provided by the Poison Control Service of the “San Giovanni di Dio” Pharmacy . These are two young migrants who landed in critical conditions in the last few hours in Lampedusa who, following poisoning caused by inhaling fuel fumes during the sea crossing, were immediately diverted to the Agrigento hospital, a regionally important center included in the circuit of the “National Poison Control Center Network”.
“Thanks to the supply and administration of the antidote we have, the so-called ‘methylene blue’ – the director of the ‘San Giovanni di Dio’ hospital pharmacy, Giuseppe Bellavia, tells us – the two patients escaped certain death given the conditions they were in.” Called around four in the morning to support assistance in the emergency area, doctors Valeria Ciotta and Valeria Pizzimenti from the hospital pharmacy immediately rushed to the hospital to make the antidote available from the precious anti-poison bank within half an hour ( this is the time in which the drug had to be administered to be effective). “The patients immediately responded to the treatment – commented in the morning the director of the Resuscitation and Intensive Care Unit of the Agrigento hospital, Gerlando Fiorica – they are definitely better and we are confident that we will be able to transfer them to the general medical department as early as tomorrow.”
The splendid news comes to make the community breathe a sigh of relief for two young lives taken from death and, at the same time, establishes the peculiar importance of the Poison Control Service of the Agrigento hospital. In the recent period, the progressive expansion of the quantities and types of drugs and galenic products “stored” at the “San Giovanni di Dio” Pharmacy have made it possible to insert the list of the facility’s antidotes into the “National Antidote Bank”. (BaNdA) of the Anti-Poison Center of Pavia. In addition to becoming an important regional reference, the ASP of Agrigento actively contributes to the needs of the national network by making the resources at its disposal available, in a relationship of mutual support with the other medical-hospital sites. The ASP extraordinary commissioner, Giuseppe Capodieci, expressed his appreciation for the goal achieved: “I would like to congratulate all the healthcare workers involved in this ‘life-saving’ operation in which, in addition to the timeliness of the treatments, it was essential to be able to count on an emergency clinical service of great importance for the entire Sicilian community such as the hospital’s certified anti-poison service of Agrigento”.
