Hospital Infections kill 48,000- a year...MSNBC

[Stuart G]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35526643/ns/health-infectious_diseases/




updated 3:38 p.m. CT, Mon., Feb. 22, 2010
WASHINGTON - Pneumonia and blood-borne infections caught in U.S. hospitals killed 48,000 patients and cost $8.1 billion in 2006, according to a report released on Monday.

The study is one of the first to put a price tag on the widespread problem, which is worsening and which some experts say is adding to the growing cost of healthcare in the United States.

"In many cases, these conditions could have been avoided with better infection control in hospitals," said Ramanan Laxminarayan of Resources for the Future, a think tank that sponsored the study.


Sepsis — a blood infection — killed 20 percent of patients who developed it after surgery, Laxminarayan and colleagues reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

They studied hospital discharge records from 69 million patients at hospitals in 40 U.S. states between 1998 and 2006, looking for two diagnoses — hospital-acquired pneumonia and sepsis.

Patients who developed sepsis after surgery had to stay in the hospital on average nearly 11 days extra, at a cost of $32,900 per patient, they found. And just under 20 percent of them died.

Pneumonia patients stayed an extra 14 days after surgery, at a cost of $46,400 and more than 11 percent of them died, the researchers found.

"That's the tragedy of such cases," said Anup Malani of the University of Chicago, who worked on the study.

"In some cases, relatively healthy people check into the hospital for routine surgery. They develop sepsis because of a lapse in infection control and they can die."


The researchers said that 1.7 million healthcare-associated infections are diagnosed every year.

Many are due to drug-resistant bacteria, such as methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA, which cost more to treat because only a few drugs can work against them. These infections can also be caught outside hospitals and some studies show that such community-acquired infections are also on the rise.

One estimate from Pfizer Inc suggested that treating MRSA alone cost $4 billion a year.

Measures to prevent infection are simple and include careful handwashing, hygiene and screening patients when they check in. However, these measures are difficult to enforce, many studies have found.

Copyright 2010 Reuters. Click for restrictions.

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An amazing story..what can one say about this?

[stray cat]

1. Health care workers don't like mandates either - even if its to wash their hands

[Stuart G]

2. Well, said..

I remember entering the hopsital a number of years ago, and requested that health care workers wash their hands in the washroom next to my bed. The first one did, as I requested, none of the others did. I remember writing a letter to the hospital administrator, and she assured me that all of them did indeed wash, the implication was that I was being to carefull. I guess this story proves that I wasn't.

[Warpy]

5. Those of us who have passed microbiology

become compulsive hand washers. That applies to me 30 years after I'd taken the course. After growing out swabs from surfaces we consider relatively benign, we don't want to touch anything.

Unfortunately, some patient care people don't have the benefit of microbiology education and don't quite buy into the germ theory.

[Warpy]

3. One can say quite a few things

One thing is that a new warming apparatus has been developed for surgical patients that has been found to decrease postop infections markedly simply by keeping the patient surrounded by 97 degree air. Anyone who has ever worked in a PACU knows how hard it is to get a postop patient to stop shivering no matter how many heated blankets we pile on. The inflatable, disposable suit does just that, while maintaining a strong blood supply to the wound and that is what is decreasing the infections. The cost of the apparatus is comparable to that of heating and laundering a single blanket, so I think it'll become standard.

As for pneumonias, that's why we boot people out of bed within the first 12 hours and make them march, give them incentive spirometers, nag them to turn and cough whenever there's a commercial on the TV in the room. We need to get their lungs expanded and everything moving and all the anesthesia fluff expectorated. Those of us who have been through surgery, ourselves, will give them the whole candy store so that they will be more motivated to do it.

I don't think there's a way to stop all infections, especially in smokers and diabetics, but we do what we can to reduce them. Sometimes reducing them is the best you can do.

[pruple]

4. sepsis killed my dad

My father died of sepsis, after going into the hospital for a surgery with a 1% rate of complications. He was in intensive care for 13 days. I don't know the cost of that.