Almost 60 per cent of the more than 700 deaths reported to the State's National Poisons Information Centre (NPIC) over the past four decades have been as a result of people ingesting weedkiller.
The figure was released at a conference yesterday marking the 40th anniversary of the foundation of the centre, which is now based at Dublin's Beaumont Hospital.
The centre said that every year since 1966, when it was established, it has been notified of cases in which individuals died after ingesting weedkiller. There were 32 such cases in 1976 alone.
The director of the centre, Dr Joseph Tracey, warned about decanting weedkiller or other toxic substances such as household bleach into containers normally associated with food or soft drinks.
In a number of instances over the years this practice has resulted in adults and children being accidentally poisoned with weedkiller. These included a 12-year-old boy who died in 1967 and a three-year-old child who died in 2004.
Dr Tracey said industrial chemicals should carry a warning about decanting.
Only deaths which follow hospitalisation or presentation at an A&E department or a GP surgery tend to be reported to the NPIC, which is usually contacted by doctors for advice on how to treat poisoned patients.
This means the numbers dying annually as a result of poisoning would be even greater than the NPIC's figures show.
Since its establishment the centre has received 308,132 calls and it has recorded details of 761 fatalities, of which 440 followed ingestion of weedkiller.
The centre said it also regularly gets calls for advice after children take tablets belonging to adults, including things like iron tablets. There were, for example, 253 cases of paediatric iron poisoning reported to the NPIC between January 2000 and December 2004. Some 75 of the patients had taken a potentially toxic amount of iron and the majority of these were children under the age of three years.
Dr Tracey warned people to be conscious of where they stored medicines and to keep them out of reach of children. He said the NPIC had more recently been receiving calls for advice about how to treat patients who had been admitted to hospital after taking cocaine.
The centre recorded 14 deaths following poisoning in 2005, and two of these were in men who had taken cocaine.
At present just 20 per cent of calls to the centre are from the public and Dr Tracey said the centre would like to develop into a proper public access poisons information service, with a dedicated telephone number for the public.
"This type of service is the norm throughout Europe and the US and has been shown to reduce the number of unnecessary visits to A&E departments, especially in paediatric cases," he said.
"Early contact with the NPIC by members of the public could result in reduced costs to the healthcare service and more efficient utilisation of emergency department staff," he added.
Minister for Health Mary Harney, who attended the conference, said some dangerous products were very easy to open and in the interests of protecting children manufacturers should take this on board.
"I think there are lessons there for the manufacturer," she said.