Linden, New Jersey Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Tragedy

Linden, New Jersey Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Leaves One Child Dead

Attorney Gordon Johnson

800-992-9447

A young boy is dead and his sister is in critical condition after the Linden, New Jersey carbon monoxide poisoning tragedy. While a carbon monoxide detector was installed in the home, it didn’t warn the family. The 9-year-old boy was pronounced dead shortly after the event, and his 10-year-old sister was taken to the hospital and transferred to a different hospital for specialized treatment.

When I read the article about this boy and his sister online at NBC New York, my first area of concern was the condition of the sister. Treating carbon monoxide poisoning with hyperbaric oxygen significantly reduces the cognitive sequelae (conditions resulting from an injury). In Dr. Lindell K. Weaver’s study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, “Hyperbaric Oxygen for Acute Carbon Monoxide Poisoning,” published in 2002, the group treated with hyperbaric oxygen saw much less frequent cognitive sequelae (25 percent) than in the normobaric oxygen group (46.1 percent.) Hyperbaric oxygen is pressurized to 2 or 3 atmospheres absolute. Normobaric oxygen is pressurized to 1 atmosphere absolute. In other words, those who just get oxygen through a mask will have more trouble than those who get treated in the hyperbaric chamber.

Those with brain damage after carbon monoxide poisoning make up the majority of our practice today, and we have found remarkable differences in the outcomes of those who get hyperbaric oxygen treatment and those who don’t. The biggest difference is in the degree of problems with secondary issues that occur after the effect of hypoxia (lack of oxygen to the brain) has worn off. The condition is called Delayed Neurological Sequelae and the problems worsen from day 1 to day 60 after the carbon monoxide poisoning occurs.

Tomorrow we will talk about the nature of those complications in our followup blog for concerns that may linger with the survivor of this Linden, New Jersey carbon monoxide poisoning incident.