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Mona Reeder / Dallas Morning News
Whitney Mitchell, 20, of Dallas, lost her arms and legs nearly two years ago to a fast-moving bloodstream infection called sepsis. A new device just approved by the Food and Drug Administration is the first to allow rapid identification of specific bacteria that cause the infections.
Nearly two years after her teenage daughter lost all four limbs to a dangerous bloodstream infection, Patricia Kirven is stunned at how little most people know about sepsis.
“You can ask the average person on the street and they don’t know what it is,” said Kirven, mother of Whitney Mitchell, now 20. “I have a friend who says that sepsis is the killer you’ve never heard of.”
Only high-profile cases seem to attract attention, like Whitney Mitchell's disfiguring infection, or the recent death of a 12-year-old New York boy, Rory Staunton, who developed severe septic shock two days after a minor gym class cut.
That’s despite the fact that hospital stays for sepsis in the U.S. have more than doubled in recent years, accounting for about 1.6 million hospitalizations a year and requiring treatment for some 4,600 new patients every day, according to a 2011 report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
The infection -- also known as septicemia or bacteremia -- can be sudden, capricious and difficult to identify, masquerading as a minor injury or illness that erupts into full-blown, whole-body organ failure within hours or days.
The mortality rate is alarming -- between 20 percent and 50 percent -- and largely depends on how quickly victims are diagnosed and treated with powerful antibiotics to battle the bacteria racing through their systems. Among those who live, amputations are common after the infection leads to tissue death in the limbs.
In Whitney Mitchell’s case, a lawsuit accuses doctors at the Medical City Dallas Hospital of not giving her appropriate antibiotics for 38 hours after she showed up in the emergency room. In Rory Staunton’s case, his parents told the New York Times that critical medical information was ignored at NYU Langone Medical Center and that the signs of sepsis were disregarded. In both cases, critics said the victims were sent home from the emergency room before returning a day or so later in life-threatening condition.
“Getting a quick answer is a matter of life and death,” said Preeti Pancholi, an assistant professor of pathology and director of clinical microbiology at The Ohio State University Medical Center.
That’s why her hospital recently joined with five others across the country to test a device approved in June by the federal Food and Drug Administration that experts believe could drastically change the way sepsis infections are detected and managed.
About the size of a small microwave oven, the Verigene Gram-positive Blood Culture Nucleic Acid Test is the first system approved by the FDA to identify quickly certain bacteria responsible for bloodstream infections -- and whether some are resistant to the top drugs used against them.
Instead of the three days required for a traditional blood culture panel, results from the Verigene test come back within three hours, identifying up to a dozen specific bacteria known to cause sepsis, including strains of Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, Enterococcus and Listeria.
Plus, the test can tell whether the germs are Methicillin-resistant Staph aureus, or MRSA, or vancomycin-resistant Enterococci, or VRE, two of the toughest pathogens around.
“That’s a big change,” said Nathan Ledeboer, medical director of the clinical microbiology and molecular diagnostics laboratories at the Medical College of Wisconsin. “We don’t have to wait three days any more to get appropriate antibiotics on board.”
Ledeboer, like Pancholi, agreed to participate in a seven-month clinical trial of the device produced and manufactured by Nanosphere Inc., of Northbrook, Ill.
Two weeks ago, Ledeboer, who said he has no financial ties to the product, went live with the Verigene test.
“In those two weeks, we’re seeing that patients are in fact being treated more appropriately sooner,” he said.
The reason is this: When patients come in with signs of suspected sepsis, including fever, low blood pressure and a racing heartbeat, it can be difficult for doctors to be certain it's a bloodstream infection and not another problem. Once they do confirm sepsis, doctors need to treat the patients fast. A 2010 study in the journal Critical Care Medicine found that for every hour of delay in administering antibiotics, mortality rose by 7.6 percent.
To that end, they break out what Ledeboer calls the “big guns” of antibiotics, the broad-spectrum drugs that can treat many pathogens at once. The trouble is, many bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics, meaning the treatments would be either be useless against the infections -- or they’ll help create the next generation of even tougher bugs.
“What we’re seeing now is that if you present with sepsis or any Gram-negative infection in New York City, you run a 30 percent risk of a pan-resistant organism,” Ledeboer said.
That is, an infection that virtually can’t be cured.
With the Verigene test, quick results mean doctors know faster exactly which bacteria they’re up against -- and whether the bugs are already resistant to top drugs.
“It means patients are going to get out of the hospital faster, out of the ICU faster and it increases their chances of surviving sepsis,” Ledeboer said.
The test works by mapping the genome of a particular bacterium and capturing it on a glass slide, said Bill Moffitt, president and chief executive of Nanosphere. If that bacterium is present in the blood sample, it will bind to the material on the slide. Then the test uses silver-coated gold nanoparticles to bind to the captured genetic sequence. When light is shined on the slide, if the spots light up, it means the bug is present in the sample.
In trials that compared the Verigene test to traditional cultures and then verified them at an independent laboratory, the new device had a very high rate of accuracy, at least above 95 percent said Pancholi.
FDA officials based their approval decision on a study of 1,642 patient blood samples that compared traditional methods with the Vergiene test, with accuracy ranging from 93 percent to 100 percent.
Since the FDA approval, more than 200 hospitals have expressed interest, Moffitt said. The Verigene units cost between $50,000 and $100,000 apiece. The test panels cost about $75 each.
But Moffitt and Ledeboer estimate that the tests could significantly reduce the current $20,000 cost of a single sepsis workup.
Independent infectious disease experts were quick to praise the new technology.
“This seems to be the first product from our molecular revolution,” said Dr. William Schaffner, chair of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University. Quicker detection and treatment of sepsis may be the only way to start to cut the rising mortality caused by the insidious bacteria, he added.
“It’s a very exciting development," he said.
For victims already ravaged by sepsis, such progress is bittersweet. If there had been a quicker test to identify specific bacteria, perhaps doctors would have identified the source of Whitney Mitchell's infection, said Kervin, her mother.
"They never could tell us exactly what it was," she said.
Reached by phone at the Dallas home she shares with her mom, Whitney Mitchell said she was hospitalized for months after her amputations in 2010. She now spends her days going to physical therapy sessions, doing exercises at home to strengthen her shortened limbs and trying as best she can to resume her life. She's got a lively online presence and a supportive community. Although she has prostheses for her arms, including one set she calls her "pretty hands," she said she's gotten good at typing using a tough nub on her residual arm.
"I'm always on the computer," said Mitchell. "I have a callus on the tip of it because I type so much."
Bob Bergert, the lawyer representing Medical City Dallas Hospital and the medical team involved said that they have "great empathy" for Mitchell and her family, but added that she received "appropriate care based on the facts and resources available to the healthcare providers."
Still, at age 20, Whitney Mitchell faces a lifetime of prosthetics and several additional surgeries. Kervin said she wishes there had been a test, a tool, anything that would have stopped the infection that raced through her daughter's body.
“It makes me happy and sad,” Kervin said. “Sad that it wasn’t there for my daughter, but glad that it will help other families from going through the pain we’re going through.”
More from Vitals:
- Gym class cut leads to deadly infection in boy, 12
- Burned-out nurses linked to more infections
- Deadly MRSA infections on the decline
This past spring, Rory Staunton, 12, got a minor scrape on his arm during gym class. Four days later, he died of toxic shock syndrome. TODAY's Savannah Guthrie reports and speaks with Rory's parents, Orlaith and Ciaran Staunton, who say doctors could have done more to save him.
Leave a Comment:
$20,000 for a single sepsis workup...good God. I wonder who's pocketing the bulk of that - certainly not the $22/hour lab tech doing the work. Unbelievable.
Medicaid
Wrong, private insurance companies are pocketing it and the execs of the testing companies.
good god, a routine blood test at Labcorp is over $400
Private insurance companies are not pocketing it. How could this possibly occur when they pay the labs? I am not a fan of the insurance companies but your comment doesn't make any sense. Now if you wanted to argue premium cost, that is another argument. Also there are several non-profits that run health insurance that have to pay the same price including Medicare and Medicaid.
Considering the severity and increasing occurance of the disease, and the life and death difference in knowing what it is in three hours versus three days, I cannot imagine why you are worried about who get's the $20,000. It's new. Scientists had to work years to invent it. Companies had to pay said scientists for years while they worked on it. It has to be produced and distributed and then doctors have to do it. An MRI, which has been around for years, costs $5,000 to $10,000 depending on where you go.
Instead of whining, send up a big cheer for a new product that can save many lives.
THIS IS A VERY BIG DEAL!!!
As an ICU physician, one of the things we fear most in the hospitalized patient (particularly in the ICU) with multiple intravenous lines, "deep" intravenous "central" lines, respirators and breathing (endotracheal-tracheostomy), urinary catheters, etc.
Each is an "invasion" with a "foreign object" just waiting to get infected, often by multiply resistant bacteria (and where did they come from - overuse of broad spectrum antibiotics in humans and animals (feed lots, hen houses, etc.)
When one suspects an infection (and in this case "sepsis", a blood-borne infection) you are racing the clock. Traditionally, one takes "cultures" (swabs, blood samples, sputum samples, urine specimens) and 1. examines them under a microscope (a Gram stain) to get a gross idea of what is there, and puts them in culture medium (liquid, an agar culture plate) and incubates them. This can take hours (for a heavily infected sample, to days or even weeks (TB). Having done that, one can find out what antibiotics the bacteria is sensitive to.
In the mean time, one starts "empiric" antibiotic therapy with one of more antibiotics , hoping you have covered the right bacteria. It is an intelligent "guess", aided by the results in previous cultures and sensitivities (this is done by the lab and the Infectious Disease surveillance nurse).
If you guess right - great. If you guess wrong, the patient gets sicker until the sensitivities come back.
The addition of such immediate screening can save hours, if not days, of time and expense of being in the hospital and getting people home alive.
Like any device, there are errors - in this case, the machine is 95% right, leaving 5% wrong (grossly oversimplified).
In any case, the potential cost-benefit ratio (cost of the machine vs the reduction in the cost of hospitalization could be huge. Is it REALLY true? THAT is why all devices and treatments undergo (hopefully) randomized clinical trials to see if the claims are true or not.
I had MRSA twice once with cellulites. I would pay anything if that happened to me again because once it is in your body it can kill you.
My baby spent 5 weeks in a children's hospital, 3 of which were in the ICU. After his second surgery, the blood sample from his arterial line came back positive for a gram negative rod infection. (the sample only grew bacteria the first day) The doctors were not horribly concerned at that point because he showed no clinical signs of an infection (he was already on antibiotics for peritonitis since he had an emergency bowel resection). Then two days later he started running a fever and his heart rate was elevated. More blood cultures were taken and we had to wait 3 DAYS to know if our 30 day old baby definitely had a blood infection. It was horrible. When I read this article I rejoiced because doctors and patients will only have to wait 3 hours to know for sure! For our baby it looks like it was an infected line or sample, and he most likely did not have a blood infection, but I would never wish those horrible few days on any parent.
Somebefuddled guy, the $20,000 is for the current lab tests - the ones that take 3 days...
This is a very big deal. Our son was only 15 months old when he became very ill suddenly. He was a former preemie so we suspected something respiratory, perhaps pneumonia. One night when his fever was over 104, he awoke disoriented. We ran him to the ER where they did a workup on him. They did a chest xray among other things. There was a little cloudiness in his lung but I didn't really buy that it was pneumonia as he wasn't exhibiting other classical symptoms. On a hunch, I asked them to draw his blood just in case. After being given IV fluids he did perk up a bit. About 24 hours later, I got a call from my son's pediatrician telling me to get to the hospital asap to have our son admitted. He had enterococcus in his blood. 2 weeks in the hospital to kill his sepsis. Found out later he had a bit of reflux in one ureter and he had a bad kidney infection that had spread to his blood. It was scary to realize how close your baby could come to death.
It's Medicaid, They serve more people than private pay. I'm in the industry and i deal with this everyday.
right, and medicaid is taking 20% off the top for commissions and another 20% for dividend and CEO bonuses...
yep, soooo efficient that private system.
(sarcasm)
if we really wanted to fix our health care system, we would look to Germany and France (and definitely not Canada).
a multi-layered health care system that has both public insurance for all, and allows for private insurance if you want top-tier medical services. their results are superior to the US and they spend half of what we do on it without bankrupting families.
we are dumping 19% of our GDP into healthcare, no other industrialized country spends more than 9% GDP for equal or better results
oh btw, medicaid serves more people for less than private insurance does, which blows your theory out of the water. but I'm all for dumping it if we can get a real, 21st century healthcare system in place, and "vouchers" sure as hell aren't going to do that
Thank you for writing about sepsis and helping raise awareness. I work with Sepsis Alliance, a not-for-profit patient advocacy organization. The number of people who have never heard of sepsis is frightening - particularly because it is such a major killer in the US.
In May 1992 my daughter 7 months pregnant, she came down with Sepsis. It started with a little sore on her finger, within hours it was a abscess. She went to the local hospital and they did a culture and said she was OK and gave her antibiotics. That night she was in Atlantic City Hospital. She lost the baby. She kept going down hill, finally the blood test came back sepsis. They gave her less than 50% of surviving. She went into heart failure and going into kidney failure when a experimental drug was given to her. Later we found that drug did not make it on the market because too many died taken the drug. She was a very lucky person to survived this infection.
My mother got sick about the 4t of July -she refused to go to the doctor thinking it was just the flu...Once we finally got her in the doctor called the ambulance right away...because of his quick thinking she is alive and well. Her platelets droped below 33000 - A few days in ICU on stong antibiotics worked wonders. If we would have waited one more day, she would not be here...I knew what Sepsis was, but did not know how serious it could be until the doctor told us how sick she really was. After 5 long weeks she was released by the infection disease doctor...and on the road to recovery!
More propaganda based on all that science junk. If you get sick, just pray to the Lord because He has a plan for you. When are we gonna stop pretending science does us any good. It just increases our deficit by wasting taxpayer money on so-called "scientists", who are just elitist college people who never had to a work a day in their life. In November make sure to vote for all candidates on the GOP ticket including the Tea Party so we can put an end to this nonsensical boondoggle called "science".
Hey, gravis, do you see that cord that runs from your computer to the wall socket? Ok, now find a pair of solid metal scissors and cut that cord. If scissors are not available, chew through it. For best results, make sure you are soaking your feet in some water.
@PeopleAreTheEnemy - I think this was some sort of sarcasm/satire like he Colbert report.
obviously, gravis was being sarcastic.
but it certainly echoes the anti-science, "religion is the answer to everything" crowd that is threatening to destroy everything we built in America today.
For a second, I thought gravis was serious, based on some of the people we all know of. We tend not to get too many up here but the web brings the world closer together. I truly hope this works. Sepsis is a huge problem and just about every time someone close to me has surgery, we end up with an infection of some sort. The hospitals actually released him from triple bypass w/o any antibiotics and only checked, for a second, the chest area before releasing. Oops-forgot about the thigh where the vein was harvested...At first, he assumed the pain was "normal", since compared to the chest, it was about the same. Then I looked at it, threw clothes on and rushed him to local dr who originally treated the cardio who flipped and ordered an ambulance-into the hosp for IV antibiotics.
gravis- Talk about nonsense, you just scored big time!
This guy is a complete idiot. Crawl under a rock and die
gravis - I am appalled and offended by your stupidity. As a two time survivor of sepsis who still has lingering medical problems brought on by my first episode 15 yrs. ago I thank God every single day for those scientist/doctors who saved my life, not once but twice. That is pretty much unheard of. Only 1 in 3 patients will survive most cases. I wake up each day and KNOW I am lucky to be alive. But still, I hope that if you ever face it you will make it through it.
gravis .... Did you Graduate from Moron University? This has to be the most ignorant post I have seen on a comment page .... and perhaps the most compelling reason to stay away from the "Tea Party" candidates!
A true reflection of the mindset of mental midgets that roam about this planet ....as gravis is well aware ..
I suspect it was a feeble attempt at humor on gravis' part. Either way, it wasn't funny.
Gravis is clearly an idiot trying to start an argument. Politics and stupidity (close relatives that they are) have NO place in this discussion.
Sepsis is a serious problem that is getting worse. This new test has promise. God willing, it will work.
One question - when the boy was, in his parents' words, "screaming in pain", was there no outward sign of an infection in his leg? If there was, why was that not the focus of his ER visit??
BTW, faith and science can and should work together. Truth is truth no matter where it's found.
As a retired ER/ICU nurse anything that can help start infection treatment earlier is a godsend. Over 30 years I watched so many people young and old die as we tried everthing in our power to stop the horrible effects of micro clots (what actually causes the tissue death in the limbs) low blood pressures that cause kidney failure, high temperatures that kill brain tissues. My recommendation to all non-medical people is learn, learn, and learn more. I will bet that if you go to the doctor with every cut and scratch you will not be agressivly treated. But if you go when you have the early signs of systemic infection, more attention will be paid. If you have fever with severe chills, thirst, dark urine please go. By the way, severe pain is not a usual sign of sepsis. Dead tissue does not hurt.
MoonBeam... your cheek... gravis' hook
moonbeamracer, I mean no offense but your attempt at putting a political spin on this is unfounded and untrue. I am a Republican, leaning more to the liberal side and you don't know a thing about how every "tea bagger" looks at things. As a matter of fact, I'd say your view is the one to stay away from. We are talking about life & death medicine here, not politics. I would appreciate you not presuming to speak out on my behalf. Have a good, healthy day.
Gravis: What kind of crazy are you to turn a story about progress in treating sepsis into a political rant? I too, had a child who was diagnosed with sepsis and almost lost his leg because of it. Complicating things was the fact that he was allergic to penicillin. When they took him into surgery, the surgeon told me that he was going to do his best to save his leg..and he did. This all began when he fell on the school playground and scraped his leg on a rock. He didn't tell me about it until I noticed he was limping. I took him to the ER and they decided that it was just an "infection." I was given antiseptic to clean it, but I was noticing that it just wasn't getting better. I took him back to the ER and that's when they decided to keep him. The diagnosis of sepsis came shortly after. I had no idea that he could die from this. Two days of intravenous Keflex and and he did not get better. Thank goodness for the surgical consult who said that they needed to cut out the infected part of his leg. Three weeks later, my son still had his leg, albeit with a very large hole in it. He went on to play soccer for his school.
Sepsis certainly IS the killer that no one knows anything about. I told the school where my son attended what had happened to him, and they made it a policy to inspect and document each and every cut and scrape that the schoolchildren got on the grounds and to send notes home to parents alerting them of the injuries. I am certain that change of policy may have saved other children and their parents from a lot of unnecessary grief.
I was hoping that Gravis was being sarcastic. :/
Geeze: does the writer of this article know how to proofread their work?
"The trouble is, many drugs are become resistant to antibiotic".
How about "many bacteria have become resistant to antibiotics" ?
gravis: we can only hope you get this disease, and it doesn't get diagnosed before you're gone. Please tell us you don't have offspring.
Flyer1--where did you see that? I see: "The trouble is, many bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics, meaning . . . " Maybe you need glasses?
The writer saw it, and has since corrected it.
I just copied and pasted it into my comment.
You'd think the writer could have at least posted a thank you.
The Lord put dangerous pathogens like Staphylococcus and Streptococcus on the planet for one reason, to punish sinners. Just like he put us on the earth to obliterate the dinosaurs. We should not be trying to interfere with His work with this "science" stuff.
Are you on freaking crack you stupid moronic dumb f__king idiot!!!!!! Okay so a child gets a cut on his leg and gets sepsis and you think he's big punished!!!!! Tell you what you dumb stupid Gravis!! Go take a long walk off of a short pier into allligator infested waters. The world will be better of without you!!
Do us all a favor, Gravis, and offer yourself up for a demonstration.
You need to put another layer of aluminum foil in your hat.
Gravis, you are giving Christianity a bad name. Please leave.
To the community: not all Christians wear gravi's aluminum foil hat, please don't stereotype, please I beg you.
Oh!! So Gravis, you're first post wasn't out of humor and sarcasm? WOW. I wonder if you also picket fallen soldiers funerals?
Gravis has a direct line to Baby Jeebus, I'm jealous.
Gravis is a troll, probably LFAO. Ignore him.
BTW - I had a cat that developed sepsis and had to be euthanized. He was declawed and got outside. Evidently, he got into a fight and got the bacteria in his bloodstream. One day he was fine, a few days later, he couldn't move and had problems breathing. Sepsis works fast! Good article.
Please tell me I'm not the only one hoping that Gravis is going for, but seriously missing, satire?
Wow, this is great news. Both of my parents died from sepsis. My mother had cancer and my father had heart problems but their cause of death was sepsis.
"In Whitney Mitchell’s case, a lawsuit accuses doctors at the Medical City Dallas Hospital of not giving her appropriate antibiotics for 38 hours after she showed up in the emergency room. In Rory Staunton’s case, his parents told the New York Times that critical medical information was ignored at NYU Langone Medical Center and that the signs of sepsis were disregarded. In both cases, critics said the victims were sent home from the emergency room before returning a day or so later in life-threatening condition."
Sadly, this actually does not surprise me that MDs miss this diagnosis. As a registered nurse I have overcome my own "mysterious" health challenges by doing a LOT of my own research with trial and error. Luckily, I have found a MD who listens to me and works with me, letting me have my input so I could get well.
I can share this fact, that the introduction of genetically modified foods is known to decrease the immune system. It is interesting to note that GMOs were introduced in 1994. And since then we have seen a DOUBLING of sepsis? Coincidence? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPvkZv5MfRw
In addition, factory farmed animals are given a TON of antibiotics, which Americans ingest daily. A long steady intake of antibiotics in your diet will eventually erode your own natural healthy gut flora. And did you know that a large part of your immune system is in your intestinal tract?
"Multiple data clearly indicate that the function of the gut is by far not restricted to food processing and subsequent nutrient and fluid uptake (Figure1). Animal experiments and some human data have shown that the gut communicates with bacteria that support digestion by their enzymatic capacity [11,12], that the gut regulates major epithelial and immune functions of importance for gut health and health in general [13,14] and that the gut reports to the brain via the N. vagus and hormones about energy uptake and other conditions that might affect mood and general well-being."
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/9/24
GRAVIS!! rkaralius!!! It is OBVIOUS you have never had someone you loved become Septic and die.
At this point, it is not IF it ever happens to you or your family, but WHEN. The germs out there now, are mutating hourly and becoming more and more and more antibiotic-resistant. Therefore, any one of us, at any moment could become Septic! How do I know? My darling Husband died not too long ago, of Septicemia. And where did he get it? FROM THE HOSPITAL!!!! How do people get more ill in the Hospitals? From hospital personnel not washing their hands OR equipment properly. The germs are also becoming more and more resistant to alcohol-based hand cleaners (or equipment cleaners). That would be C.Diff....Enterobacter....etc.....
So, to be able to identify and HOPE they can QUICKLY find the specific and correct antibiotic that might work on that germ, before it takes over the body and quickly shuts down all the organs. Well, it is a blessing and DON'T try to put a political spin on tragedy.
There but, for the grace of God, go YOU.
NBCnewsReader, the only obvious thing here is that you misunderstood my post. All I said was that $20,000 for a series of lab tests is ridiculous. Which it is. I'm not sure how that led to you thinking I'm opposed to the new technology, especially since it will help reduce that cost. I'm actually delighted that they have a way to identify sepsis germs so quickly - I was just floored by that $20,000 figure. I've worked in micro labs, so I have an idea of the cost of reagents/equipment used for bacterial identification, and in my experience it's nowhere near that amount. Somebody's getting rich, and the idea that it's at the expense of desperately ill patients makes me mad. I'm sorry you took it the wrong way, and I'm sorry you lost your husband to such a ruthless infection.
Unfortunately, eating just about anything today requires careful research. Animals are pumped full of poisons and mistreated. The stress causes them to release certain chemicals into their meat which will make you sick. Just like second-hand smoke, you're getting second-hand antibiotics. THAT'S why antibiotics don't work. Even fruits and vegetables are genetically modified. In short, very little of our food is real. This is why we are suffering and dying from diseases like sepsis, cancers, a host of other physical, mental and emotional disorders. Think about it! I can't believe the medical community can be so ignorant -- they put practically no controls on our diets while they continue to treat us as we die.
Relax guys, he's just soliciting his jibberish to paint a bad name for whatever organization he's not into - judging by the sounds of it, some redneck bible-thumping politicians down in the belt somewhere. Its all a bunch of misleading crap to get a rise out of you and subliminally make you think anyone affiliated with the Tea Party, the Church or even politics in general is a complete loon... which I s'pose they kinda are, since so many of them think comments like the one above have any value or relation to the topic at hand or even the public at large?!?
In any case, just let him spit his unrelated god/politics propaganda so he can get it out of his system and we'll all move on with our lives.
Why is it so difficult to have a discussion without interjecting something offensive into everything. I am from the MS Gulf Coast. I am Repub, leaning to the more liberal side. I respect the opinions of Dems/Libs even though I may disagree with them. Does that make me a red-neck bible thumper from "down in the belt". No, it doesn't. But you are doing exactly what you you are calling someone else names for. You could have just as easily said what you wanted without resorting to name calling. Why are so many folks having such a difficult time being civil enough to have a meaningful discussion? We're all in this together folks and if we don't soon get a handle on this "our side/their side and us vs. them" mentality we are all doomed.
We always played as kids and got scrapes and cuts...how come nothing happened back then? Why now is this an issue?
Because the meat we ate was not full of antibiotics given to them just days before they were slaughtered and put into the supermarkets, and because sick animals were not allowed to be slaughtered back then.
Also, it wasn't mandated and expected that every sniffle be treated by a doctor, and doctors weren't just pill pushers. Now it's a specialist for a hangnail, a pill for acne. Bodies have no natural resistance against anything, and we are passing along to our children.
No way the "20-50% mortality rate" is correct. I work on a medical/telemetry floor and at any given time, we usually have 1 to 4 people admitted with sepsis. I'd say about once every couple weeks, a person with an infection develops sepsis. Of the dozens of people I have treated, none of them have ever died or even went to critical condition. The 7% increase in mortality per hour seems even more bogus- until you click on the link they provide to a study, which mentions findings in "patients with severe sepsis or septic shock."
Septic shock or "severe" sepsis is much different than normal sepsis, just like a severe laceration like getting your hand chopped off is much different than getting a scrape. Everyone seems to forget your body has an immune system. Septic shock or severe sepsis only happens when your body has been fighting hard against an infection for a while and finally gives up. It does NOT start from the minute sepsis starts. Case in point: let's use the "7% mortality per hour" claim they give for ANY sepsis, along with the Whitney Mitchell example. According to their formula, Whitney should have been dead less than 15 hours after leaving the emergency room (7% x 15 = 105%), so either she is ridiculously lucky for surviving, or that statistic only applies to people who have already reached a septic crisis.
Point being, this article is twisting the truth a bit and sensationalizing the issue to make it appear more shocking that it actually is. Infections have been killing people since - well, since people were even around. It is and has always been one of the most frequent causes of death, but it does not INSTANTLY happen, and your chances of surviving an infection are very good as long as you get treated. These are stories of people who weren't treated and waited more than a day for a re-evaluation (they got bad medical advice, sure, but this is not common nor acceptable practice). It's good that MSNBC is spreading awareness, but I find it disappointing they have to resort to fact-twisting and fear-mongering to do it.
I agree that they should avoid sensationalizing, but I also recognize that sometimes, sensationalizing is the only way to get the general public to pay attention enough for the message to get through.
Maybe it's a symptom of the current cram-and-rush culture (or of the media), but people will dismiss as unimportant, anything that isn't hyped to some degree. If it isn't hyped as an immediate threat, then it gets lost in the crush of other "important" tasks and information.
rn,
there may be some selection bias on your part. The severe sepsis patients are probably admitted directly to the ICU. You are seeing the borderline septic patients, that are probably more like a UTI and fever.
RNMIKE, you are absolutely correct. I should clarify that the 2 episodes I had both led to septic shock, which is not always the case. Both times I was already in the hospital but then rushed to I.C.U. I was told by my Dr. that only 1 in 3 will survive once it turns into septic shock. I am a walking miracle as far as I'm concerned, and anything they can do to improve that outlook is worth any amount of money.
I had a friend who died of sepsis. She absolutely refused to have her teeth cleaned by a dentist. She developed a very bad gum infection which led to sepsis.
She knew she needed to get her teeth cleaned and flat out refused to have it done because. "That Hurts"
You just can't fix stupid or ignorant.
Anyone presenting with signs and symptoms of sepsis (fever, tachycardia, and hypotension, elevated WBC) as the article states, should be treated IMMEDIATELY with BROAD spectrum antibiotics AFTER blood cultures are obtained. Once the cultures and sensitivities return, whether positive or negative, therapy will be adjusted accordingly.
One should not wait one single hour to start empiric treatment. If for every hour of wait mortality increases 7.6%, three hours wait is approximately 23% increase in mortality. This is not acceptable. TREAT NOW, TREAT BROADLY.
it may cost the hospital $75 for every test. However, the question still unanswered is: How much will it cost you?
Recommended reader: RNMIKE posting #14
Sorry RNMIKE posting #15
10 yrs ago my son (11 months old at the time) developed an infection. He woke up sick, looking like he had when he had pneumonia as a newborn. After exam showed rapid respirations but chest xray was clear, his bloodwork came back with a critically high wbc (over 30k). Instead of doing a blood culture or spinal tap they simply gave him a shot in his bottom and sent us home with a prescription. By the fourth day his temp was over 105, he was very dehydrate and unresponsive. The ER was shocked at how sick he was and what the other drs and ER hadn't done. He spent 4 days on super antibiotics in the hospital, with very frequent blood checks and xrays, then another month of antibiotics at home. They said if I had waited even a few hrs to take him to the ER or for his ped's office to open he would have died. It was scary and frustrating. We still don't know why he got so sick so suddenly. Doctors get an attitude with me sometimes when my other kids get sick and I insist on tests (no antibiotics unless truly necessary though) but after you've sat there helplessly watching your child get sicker and sicker, not knowing if they'll make it through the night and not being able to help them I know exactly how quickly and how sick they can get.
This is a reminder to all of us that every nick, cut, and scratch, no matter how insignificant needs to be treated at home with triple antibiotic ointment and a bandage be placed over it. We can no longer ignore the fact that a simple bacterial organism such as S. aureus or S. epidermidis can actually kill.
A hundred times THIS.
Gently clean every wound with water and a sterile pad, cotton ball, or clean (unused) wash rag, until the bleeding stops.
Use antibiotic ointment on the pad of a bandage, or directly on and around the wound.
Always cover open cuts with a bandage that is just large enough for the pad to cover the cut.
This not only helps prevent infection, a cleaned and covered wound heals much faster, and with less scarring.
My Mom died of sepsis in 2004. She had been in ER, MD told her it was bladder infection, sent her home. 4 hours later she was dead. MD did not have a clue. Hope the new test save many people much suffering.
We always played as kids and got scrapes and cuts...how come nothing happened back then? Why now is this an issue?
Any doctors out there who can explain?
Yes I'm a doctor. When we were kids we spent more time at Sunday School and Church, instead of wasting our time on meaningless distractions like Twitter, Dancing with Stars, and evolutionary theory. The Lord viewed us under a much more favorable light.
Vote Tea Party in November and take us back to Glory!
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Gravis, you're NOT A DOCTOR. No Doctor makes comments like you. After reading your posts on other news articles, you're just a moron plain and simple. But go ahead, feed us more comments! Tell us more.
I'm not sure if this is true, but the first thing to do with any cut, scrape, etc., is to wash it thoughly as soon as possible with water and soap, if available. Not swamp water, but the freshest water you are able to get. It seems to remove various things that would sit in a wound from being exposed at the surface.
Someone answered your question BEAUTIFULLY. GRAVIS, you are a moron plain and simple. You will be screaming for this technology while your laying on your death bed praying to your 'Lord' to show you the way back to being healthy. Ignorant troll.
screminmimi
Because the meat we ate was not full of antibiotics given to them just days before they were slaughtered and put into the supermarkets, and because sick animals were not allowed to be slaughtered back then.
Also, it wasn't mandated and expected that every sniffle be treated by a doctor, and doctors weren't just pill pushers. Now it's a specialist for a hangnail, a pill for acne. Bodies have no natural resistance against anything, and we are passing along to our children.
May I recommend a book - Primal Panacea by Dr. Thomas Levy/cardiologist - this book details the MANY diseases and ailments that are VERY TREATABLE and even completely healed with IV-infusion Vitamin C. That's right, Vitamin C. From HIV to cancer/s to sepsis and many toxic poisonings, Vitamin C has knocked many of them OUT!! The medical field does not want the public to be aware of this very affective treatment b/c it is inexpensive and they can make a lot more money on many of the other treatments that may or may not work
You're playing with fire when you tell someone a simple treatment cures all, including CANCER! Sorry, but I would rely on EVIDENCE BASED methods of treatment. Take your snake-oil book talk elsewhere.
I agree that vitamin C has proven to be quite useful in many diseases, but the body is more complex and usually the "one" simple remedy of this or that is not enough. Holistic approaches which bring robust health and happiness would involve so much more than one remedy.
I welcome this. Last year I had a sepsis MRSA. It was misdiagnosed 3 times, and thus took 8 days to identify. Thank God I didn't lose my life or limbs. My medical bills were over $300K. Even charging the whole $100K for this device to me would have saved everyone in my insurance pool a ton of money, and perhaps I wouldn't have had 2 surgeries, 4 months of IV antibiotics, and wouldn't have spent 6 months recovering. I can't put a dollar figure on it, but the emotional cost to me and my family was enormous.
Just wait till Onutmacare starts....At $20k per test the death rate will make Bhopal look like a Sunday picnic.
BEFORE Obama was in office, health care for my mom went from 200 to 500 a month. You GOP lovers are not smart if you think health care NEVER went up before Obama. Just shows what sheep you are watching Faux Noise. Also, I paid 7k ER bill that was 2 hours. My mom paid 50 bucks. She has insurance. How is that fair? I cannot GET insurance as NO ONE will sell it to me. I bet if you were in my shoes you'd be singing a different tune, but YOU AND EVERY OTHER REPUKELICAN DOESN'T CARE IF I GET INSURANCE TOO.
That's not true at all. I'm Republican and I care but probably have a different view on how to fix it. Doesn't make me right and you wrong, just makes us different types of personality. Please don't lump everyone together in your personal opinion.
Since the dramatic introduction of penicillin in Boston, we have been engaged in that controversial science called "evolution". Sepsis, was imprinted on our memories in the Civil War, by the quick and dynamic actions of the developing field surgeon that later led to the new idea that there were germs that it would better left out of the operating room. When you consider how slow this knowledge was to enter the human mind, and the number of now famous persons who made it possible to know, then might be tempted to conclude that "evolution" does not occur. Another way of saying this is that it rare to find a good idea as it is rare to find it fully explored, then when remember that doctors back in the day were associated with death, together the makes sense.
Penicillin was the starting point of widely available commercial antibiotics industry. Every the need for more profit, vast investments the norm, and over application the standard leads us to wonder that since the 1960's doctors have seen multiple-resistant-strains of bacteria, and the reason for that is …
With each dose, there remains, the possibility that some of the bacteria survived, allowing it to grow again, or survive unseen as natural body processed "cured" the disease. Thus it possible to further ensure a cure, an excess dose is administered, and in that we have several pathways along which the "antibiotic" is exposed to the environment. Spreading to the "environment" is an unwelcomed description, accurate to the informed, but dismissive to the deliberately uninformed. One example has been the long lived hormonal drugs, which escape from the body, via sewerage, and into the ecosystem, where indications exist of eggs in testicles. Antibiotics are used in such quantities, that natural bacteria in the environment, may be affected by exposure, by being inoculated with a resistant strain and being spread rapidly as bacteria, are easily spread. An example a resistant strain found in soil from Colorado, appeared a few months later in Sweden, both near hospitals.
Essentially the production and use of antibiotics exposes the bacterial to "evolution", where some mutants die, but some mutants do not, and some of those that do not die are harmful, and some may not.
What may be done? Bacterial are small and unseen, as well as rapidly multiplying, and easily modified. This means that only few can be observed in laboratory, or tested or experimented on, where in the vast environment this and more happens in overwhelming numbers and with variables too many to count.
Against this huge backdrop, suggestions are few and unfertile, but we could possibly design antibiotics and drugs to degrade harmlessly.
What happened? We fell asleep in class, or forgot what was available to learn, but the bacterial never stopped.