SAN ANTONIO, June 26 -- She had already taken her Ozempic injection that week. At least she thought she had. The pen on the refrigerator shelf looked the same as last week's. Seven days, every week, but the weeks blur, and the pen does not send a reminder. So she called poison control.

It was not an unusual call. By 2023, calls like hers were arriving at poison control centers across the United States more than 8,000 times a year.

A study published Thursday in the Journal of Medical Toxicology has traced that surge to a single regulatory inflection point: the June 2021 decision by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve semaglutide for chronic weight management in adults with obesity. Before that approval, American poison contr...