A study of fatal hospital infections found that 48,000 people died at studied hospitals in 40 states and more than 1.7 million a year are injured by hospital infections, MSNBC reported.
Hospital infections are occurring in increasing numbers and can be the result of unsterilized equipment or other unsafe or unhealthy conditions. So-called super bugs -- strains that survive in hospitals because they are resistant to ordinary antibiotics or disinfectants -- can also lead to the serious illness or death of a patient who was otherwise undergoing a routine operation or medical procedure.
A New York City medical malpractice firm should be consulted if you or a loved one has contracted a serious infection while in a New York hospital.
The report, one of the first to put a price tag on the widespread problem of hospital infections, found that pneumonia and blood-borne hospital infections killed 48,000 at a cost of $8.1 billion.
"In many cases, these conditions could have been avoided with better infection control in hospitals," said Ramanan Laxminarayan of Resources for the Future, which sponsored the study.
Sepsis -- a blood infection common to hospital environments -- killed 20 percent of patients who developed it after surgery, Laxminarayan and colleagues reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
The study looked at 69 million patients discharged from hospitals in 40 states between 1998 and 2006 -- looking for two diagnoses, either hospital-acquired pneumonia or sepsis.
Patients who acquired sepsis had to be hospitalized for an average of 11 extra days, at a per-patient cost of $32,900. One in five of them died.
Pneumonia patients spent an extra two weeks in the hospital after surgery, at a cost of $46,400. More than 1 in 10 of them died.
"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."
Many hospital infections are drug-resistant bacteria, like methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA. Such infections are more costly to treat and harder to recover from because so few drugs work on them. One report from Pfizer Inc suggested that treating MRSA alone costs $4 billion per year, MSNBC reported.
If you or a loved one has contracted a serious or fatal hospital infection in New York, call the New York City medical malpractice attorneys at Queller, Fisher, Washor, Fuchs & Kool for a free and confidential appointment to discuss your rights. Call 866-LifeLaw (866-543-3529).
