As super bacteria strains become more and more powerful, hospital deaths are increasing like ice cream sales in summertime.
A recent survey has pegged the total health care cost increase to be $8.1 billion due to these “hospital-acquired-infections,” in 2006 alone. By now as it has become more prevalent, this number is surely in the double digits. The death toll was 48,000 in 2006 as well, making it one of the most dangerous parts of a hospital stay. Even more dangerous in fact, then when you see the bill.
The deadly microbes responsible for this usually result in the common conditions known as sepsis and pneumonia and are called MRSA and are resistant to antibiotics. These infections can and often do end in death especially in older patients. Moreover, if this could be eliminated or controlled it would shave an incredible $10 billion off of our annual health care costs.
What is even more sad is that in most cases these situations could have been prevented with better infection control. Most of these infections are well known by doctors and even with this knowledge, the infections continue unabated.
A recent study of 70 million discharge records in 40 states revealed that sepsis and pneumonia as the leading end result of these microbes. Most of these patients went into the hospitals completely free of infection and ended up with one of the two conditions.
A good example was the average sepsis case resulted in 11 days longer in the hospital at a cost of $33,000, and nearly 20% of these people ended up dead.
The pneumonia in many cases was caused by dirty ventilator tubes being used during surgery and resulted in 14 additional hospital stays, in fact this happened to my brother during what should have been a 3 day hospital stay which lasted for 30. The cost of these pneumonia cases was an additional $46,000 per person and 11% of these cases died.
As many people are aware, due to the rampant use of antibiotics for colds and fevers, these microbes are on steroids figuratively, and are immune to anti-biotics. With each passing case, the bugs get more and more strength and immunity and thus become more difficult to treat.
This study was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio, which funds innovative ideas that may lead to breakthroughs in the future of health and health care.
