Introduction:

human health has been severely harmed by intensive use of agrochemicals in agriculture. Identification of cases, association with the use of toxics, treatment and ap propriate prevention do not seem to be happening any time soon.

Objective:

to verify the knowledge of medicine students at the Federal University of Paraná to identify agrochemical poisoning.

Methodology:

cross-sectional research with 235 students from third to fifth year, chosen by convenience, who filled out a questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and with the variance analysis tests.

Results:

from all the participants 98% had already heard about poisoning caused by agrochemicals, 44% affirmed to know the symptoms, 13% said they could treat poisoned patients. After assessing their knowledge on chronic poisoning’s signs and symptoms and designated tests and treatment, it was observed that, regardless of having taken or not an elective toxicology course, 30% of students did not know the signs and symptoms, 60% did not know which were the appropriate laboratory tests to run, and 65% did not know how to treat this poisoning. Additionally, 9.36% did not know that it was necessary to no tify this type of cases.

Conclusions:

the medicine students of the school where the study was carried out have low knowled ge about agrochemical poisoning. Even if most of them can point out possible consequences of agrochemical exposure, they do not know how to diagnose or treat agrochemical poi soning, and their level of knowledge does not improve with the progression of the course.

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