Hospital acquired infections could be fatal--study

Funded by the Resources for the Future, the study is one of the first to detail the effects of hospital-acquired infections--a widespread problem which is worsening day by day.

According to some experts, hospital acquired infections, which actually kill three times more Americans than HIV does, are adding to the spiraling cost of healthcare in the nation.

Study details
In addition to killing some 48,000 patients, hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) led to 2.3 million total days of hospitalization, at a cost of $8.1 billion, in 2006 alone, reported Reuters, citing a study from the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy at Resources for the Future--a Washington, DC-based think tank.

"It is a staggering number and one that does not have to be," study researcher Ramanan Laxminarayan, PhD, MPH, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C. think tank Resources for the Future, tells WebMD.

"When a patient goes to the hospital for another illness and dies of pneumonia, it does not always occur to the family that it was a mistake. But if that same patient went to the hospital and got blood tainted with HIV, the response would be quite different," he added.

"In many cases, these conditions could have been avoided with better infection control in hospitals," said Laxminarayan.

Study’s findings
To reach their findings, Laxminarayan and his colleagues analyzed hospital discharge records from 69 million patients who stayed at U.S. hospitals between 1998 and 2006. They were looking for the potential death toll from pneumonia and sepsis--two of the most common hospital-acquired infections.

The researchers focused only on infections picked up in the hospital, and not on infections caught in the community.

They found that the blood infection sepsis killed 20 percent of patients who contracted it after surgery. They also found that the patients who developed sepsis after surgery stayed on average 11 days longer in the hospital, at a cost of about $32,900 per patient.

Patients who picked up pneumonia in the hospital stayed an additional 14 days in the hospital at a cost of $46,400. Even worse, the researchers found that more than 11 percent of the pneumonia patients died.

"That's the tragedy of such cases," Anup Malani, a study co-author, an investigator at Extending the Cure, and professor at the University of Chicago, told Reuters. "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."

Measures to prevent superbug
Some 1.7 million healthcare-associated infections are diagnosed every year, the researchers said. Many are due to scary drug-resistant bacteria, such as methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA staph "superbug," which cost more to treat because limited medications are available to treat them.

One estimate from drug manufacturer Pfizer Inc. suggests that treating MRSA alone costs $4 billion a year.

Handwashing, improved hygiene, and screening patients as they check in are some simple and effective measures to prevent infection, but are difficult to enforce, several studies have shown.

Laxminarayan and his colleagues reported their findings in the Archives of Internal Medicine.