California Poison Control has launched a new iPhone app dubbed “Choose Your Poison,” a poison education effort undertaken through an innovative mobile health (mHealth) initiative.

The organization is rolling out the new (and free) iOS application this week, which is packaged as an informative game for kids available in both English and Spanish.

According to California Poison Control, the app is fun, interactive and underscores an important poisoning prevention message – that medications can easily be mistaken for candy.

This latest effort by the CPCS isn’t the first of its kind. Last year, the folks behind “Choose Your Poison” kicked off an SMS program with weekly poison tips sent to cell phones (it works by having users text TIPS to 69866).

“By 2012, more smart phones will be shipped than desktop computers, and by 2013, people using their mobile device to search the Internet will overtake desktop Internet users for the first time,” says CPCS communications director Iana Simeonov. “We wanted to be on the forefront of mHealth in the area of poison control and since younger people 18 – 29 tend to search for health information on their phones – a group likely to be of child bearing age – we felt it was important to make poison prevention information available this way.”

Out of more than four million poisonings that are reported each year to poison control centers across the country, it is estimated that over 90 percent of them occur in the home.

Troubling but true, the majority of non-fatal poisonings occur in children under the age of six.

“Choose Your Poison is for everyone — health care workers, parents, teens, doctors, pharmacists — anyone,” says Simeonov, pointing out that children’s vitamins can look so much like candy that even pros sometimes can’t tell the difference.

For more information, check out CPCS on Facebook at California Poison Control and on Twitter @poisoninfo.