No Deaths from Vitamins
Orthomolecular Medicine News Service
(OMNS, Dec 28, 2011) There was not even one death caused by a vitamin supplement in 2010, according to the most recent information collected by the U.S. National Poison Data System.
The new 203-page annual report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers, published online at http://www.aapcc.org/dnn/Portals/0/2010%20NPDS%20Annual%20Report.pdf, shows zero deaths from multiple vitamins; zero deaths from any of the B vitamins; zero deaths from vitamins A, C, D, or E; and zero deaths from any other vitamin.
Additionally, there were no deaths whatsoever from any amino acid or dietary mineral supplement.
Three people died from non-supplement mineral poisoning: two from medical use of sodium and one from non-supplemental iron. On page 131, the AAPCC report specifically indicates that the iron fatality was not from a nutritional supplement.
Fifty-seven poison centers provide coast-to-coast data for the National Poison Data System, “one of the few real-time national surveillance systems in existence, providing a model public health surveillance system for all types of exposures, public health event identification, resilience response and situational awareness tracking.”
Well over half of the U.S. population takes daily nutritional supplements. Even if each of those people took only one single tablet daily, that makes 165,000,000 individual doses per day, for a total of over 60 billion doses annually. Since many persons take far more than just one single vitamin or mineral tablet, actual consumption is considerably higher, and the safety of nutritional supplements is all the more remarkable.
Over 60 billion doses of vitamin and mineral supplements per year in the USA, and not a single fatality. Not one.
If vitamin and mineral supplements are allegedly so “dangerous,” as the FDA and news media so often claim, then where are the bodies?
Reference:
Bronstein AC, Spyker DA, Cantilena LR Jr, Green JL, Rumack BH, Dart RC. 2010 Annual Report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers’ National Poison Data System (NPDS): 28th Annual Report. The full text article is available for free download at http://www.aapcc.org/dnn/Portals/0/2010%20NPDS%20Annual%20Report.pdf
The data mentioned above are found in Table 22B. Mineral data on page 131; vitamin data on pages 137-139 .
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