In a series of articles dated July 21 and 22, 2002 from the Chicago
Tribune comes a frightening report of needless deaths of thousands of
infants due simply to actions of hospitals and their workers. According to
an analysis done by the Tribune of records at the federal Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, pediatric intensive care units experience up
to three times the number of infections as other hospital areas, including
operating rooms. The article reports that state and federal health-care
records show that the rate of lethal pediatric infections acquired in
hospitals is rising.
The article highlighted a tragic case from Sinai-Grace
Hospital in Detroit, during a three month period in the spring of
1997, on the same floor, within the same nursery unit, along the same row of
bassinets, hospital germs contributed to the deaths of three babies and
slipped undetected into 15 more newborns.
Probably the most chilling part of the expose were the statistics
gathered by the Tribune that linked the deaths of 2,610 infants in the year
2000 alone to preventable hospital-acquired infections. The Tribune further
identified 75,000 preventable deaths where hospital-acquired infections
played a major role. Their analysis was based on the most recent national
data, and was the most comprehensive of its kind drawing on information from
thousands of hospital and government inspection reports.
According to a Tribune inspection and investigation of
files at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the majority of
cases in pediatric intensive care units where needless deaths occurred,
lives might have been saved by such simple acts such as washing hands or
isolating patients the moment infections were detected. The Tribune's
analysis found an estimated 103,000 total deaths linked to hospital
infections in 2000. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC), which bases its numbers on extrapolations from 315 hospitals,
estimated there were 90,000 that year. The Tribune article estimated that
75,000 of the deadly hospital infections took place in conditions that were
preventable.
In an article on the same subject in the July 21, 2002 issue of the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution it was also noted that according to the federal
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, deaths linked to
hospital germs now represent the fourth-leading cause of mortality among
Americans, behind heart disease, cancer and strokes. To put this in
perspective these infections kill more people each year than car accidents,
fires and drowning combined.