‘ Every year in France, 6000 persons are victims of an intoxication due to the carbon monoxide (CO) and 300 die of it’ declares the General management of Health (DGS). How to protect itself against this noxious gas?

All apparatus of incomplete combustion generate the carbon monoxide (CO)

This very toxic suffocating gas results from an incomplete combustion (wood, butane, coal, petrol, fuel oil, natural gas, oil, propane). That’s how cases of intoxications augment every year at the beginning of winter, with delivery under way of the heating or the hot water. Certainly, the fitters and stockists of equipment of heating play CO an important role in the prevention of intoxications (revision, regulatings and compliance of apparatus) but the individuals also have to to be very vigilant.

What are the signs of an intoxication to CO?

The sharp form of intoxication imposes a catch in load immediately. She manifests itself by vertigo, a loss of knowledge, a kind of muscular paralysis, or even a coma and decease. Symptoms are spectacular and often touch several members of the same family or of a group.

On the other hand, (progressive) chronic intoxication draws away headaches, nausea, mental confusion, but also sometimes disturbances of vision, smell or taste, sleep troubles, memory, attention, thoracic, abdominal, muscular pain, etc.

These not being specific signs, intoxication is more difficult to discern. In the long, are possible appear of heart disorders or respiratory. Such intoxication is currently suspected of unsettling the cerebral development of the children and notably their intellectual functioning.

But in case of distrust, it is enough to analyse the composition of the air exhaled with a  carboxymètre , a specific detector of the carbon monoxide.

The taking care consists in putting the person poisoned under oxygenation to speed up the elimination of CO. In serious cases, the person is put in coffer hyperbaric (for 90 minutes). Then, a medical monitoring is obvious during one year to discern and to treat as possible neurological chronic or cloudy splitting headaches (disturbances of motivity, paralyses)

Butane, Carbon Monoxide, Cerebral Development, Composition Of The Air, Decease, Distrust, Fuel Oil, Gas Oil, General Management, Heart Disorders, Hyperbaric, Incomplete Combustion, Intoxication, Mental Confusion, Muscular Pain, Noxious Gas, Oil Propane, Oxygenation, Paralysis, Sleep Troubles