State public health officials disclosed that at least 474 patients contracted serious infections in Massachusetts hospitals during a one-year period, in a study that was part of a broad effort to help reduce the number of costly and sometimes fatal hospital-acquired infections through public reporting. The report showed that 71 of the 73 hospitals had infection rates at or below the national average from July 2008 to June 2009. The report did not say how many patients died, and it examined only two types of infections: patients who got bloodstream infections from intravenous lines during the full year, and surgical site infections from hip and knee operations for part of the year, the Boston Globe reports.
