We Need Infectious Disease Control in our Hospitals

Picture this scenario: Someone you know is in hospital for heart surgery. They say that the surgery is pretty risky since the patient doesn't possess the strongest of constitutions. Everyone's really scared stiff of what will happen in the operating theater. The big day arrives, the surgeons take their time doing their job well and then they come out smiling. Everyone's relieved; they feel that they are over the hump and it's just easy coasting from now on. The patient needs to heal in the intensive care unit, take care of his health and all will be well. They wheel him into the ICU, and plug a canula on the back of his hand and on the side of his neck (you know what a cannula is, don't you - it's that little needle they plug into your skin for as long as you stay in the hospital. Anytime anyone wants to inject anything into you, they just plug their syringe into the needle. It's to save you from getting pricked a hundred times during your stay). You figure that now that he's in the ICU, it's a sterile place with all infectious disease control measures in place. He is safe.

Or is he? All seems to be going well except that on the third day, there is a terrible fever. It goes worse and worse until the doctor comes out with a grave look and says that the patient has septicemia - a serious blood infection. Once it gets to the stage, things can go either way. The medicines they pump into the patient can turn things around for him. Or as the relatives of nearly 50,000 hapless patients in intensive care units around the country get to know each year, it can get out of hand. And all is lost. Can you believe that there are nearly 50,000 patients who get a deathly infection every year right in the intensive care units in our hospitals? And those are just the people who die; if you add to this the people who get the infection and survive, (and those who get it in their rooms and not in the ICU) it's four times the number. Treating those infections costs Americans about $2 billion every year in excess insurance costs.

Infections in hospitals occur because the needles and tubes inserted into patients aren't done in a clean enough matter (they are called central line infections). Doing it in a clean enough matter would be easy enough. Doctors and nurses would simply have to make sure that they wash their hands, and that they wear sterile gloves and gowns before doing anything with a needle on a patient. It's just tate doctors and nurses happen to be so overworked that they let these practices fall by the wayside. It's been bothering a lot of people for long enough that they have been working on putting infectious disease control measures in place. Last year, the nearly 50,000 patients who die in ICUs each year to blood infections no longer did. That number fell to 18,000. That's tens of thousands of lives saved. But more lives can be saved if they bring infectious disease control measures to wards and other places in hospitals. There are still tens of thousands of lives there to be saved.

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