Define sepsis. Drawing a blank? You're excused for your ignorance. Fewer than half of all Americans have heard of this medical condition, a survey conducted last year by advocacy group the Sepsis Alliance found. But it contributes to as many as half of all U.S. hospital deaths, many of them preventable, according to a recent study by Kaiser Permanente Northern California. Part of the problem? Doctors aren't thinking about sepsis either. Sepsis is the body's out-of-whack inflammatory response to infection. Its symptoms can include a high fever or low temperature, elevated heart rate and difficulty breathing. Early recognition is key to treating it.
President Obama moved via executive action Thursday to quell the rise of deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria blamed for tens of thousands of deaths a year in the United States. Obama signed an order establishing a new interagency task force and directed its members to deliver a plan by Feb. 15 to combat the threat of so-called "super bugs," bacteria that have built up a resistance to antibiotics commonly prescribed to people and animals. Top U.S. health officials called the rise of the bacteria an "urgent health threat" with major implications for economic and national security.
The country's system for handling end-of-life care is largely broken and should be overhauled at almost every level, a national panel concluded in a report released on Wednesday. The 21-member nonpartisan committee, appointed by the Institute of Medicine, the independent research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, called for sweeping change. "The bottom line is the health care system is poorly designed to meet the needs of patients near the end of life," said David M. Walker, a Republican and a former United States comptroller general, who was a chairman of the panel. "The current system is geared towards doing more, more, more, and that system by definition is not necessarily consistent with what patients want, and is also more costly."
The severe respiratory virus believed to have sickened hundreds of U.S. children in Midwestern and Western states has now spread to the Northeast, health officials report. The New York State Department of Health confirmed on Friday more than a dozen cases of infection with Enterovirus D68, which sometimes requires hospitalization, especially for children with asthma. And on Saturday, the Connecticut Department of Public Health said it had received reports from two hospitals in different parts of the state of clusters of severe respiratory illness among young children that could be due to Enterovirus D68.
Early detection has long been seen as a powerful weapon in the battle against cancer. But some experts now see it as double-edged sword. While it's clear that early-stage cancers are more treatable than late-stage ones, some leading cancer experts say that zealous screening and advanced diagnostic tools are finding ever-smaller abnormalities in prostate, breast, thyroid and other tissues. Many are being labeled cancer or precancer and treated aggressively, even though they may never have caused harm. As a result, these experts say, many people may be undergoing surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and other treatments unnecessarily, sometimes with lifelong side effects. [Subscription Required]
Despite warnings from public health experts that overprescribing antibiotics could lead to difficult-to-treat "superbugs," doctors are prescribing antibiotics to children about twice as often as they are actually needed, a new study found. Researchers at Seattle Children's Hospital examined past studies between 2001 and 2011 to see how doctors treated common childhood respiratory infections, conditions including sore throats, ear infections and sinusitis. They found that although only 27.4 percent of the infections were caused by bacteria and could therefore be treated with an antibiotic, a whopping 57 percent of them were actually treated with antibiotics. That amounts to 11.4 million unnecessary prescriptions for antibiotics per year, researchers say.