This article about infections acquired in hospitals should frighten you more than the recent Ebola panic. Here are the opening paragraphs from the Dallas Morning News:
The two Dallas nurses who survived Ebola are also survivors of a much more commonplace problem: hospital-acquired infections.
One in 25 hospital patients comes down with an infection picked up inside the hospital. In 2011, an estimated 722,000 patients acquired one, and more than 75,000 died, either directly from an infection or because an infection weakened a patient’s ability to fight other illnesses, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Those are alarming numbers. But they have declined considerably since the 1970s, when hospitals began realizing such infections were a problem.
Dr. Robert Haley, a professor of medicine and chief epidemiologist at UT Southwestern Medical Center, said in those days there were more than 2 million hospital-acquired infections a year. He was working on the issue then for the CDC.
“There’s no doubt we’ve made a huge amount of progress,” he said.
One important change was the Medicare program’s decision to eliminate what amounted to a financial incentive. A patient who caught an infectious bug in a hospital required more treatment, and that meant more money for the hospital. One recent British study found the cost of caring for patients with such infections nearly tripled once they became infected.
“Now they [Medicare] don’t pay for it,” Haley said. “That’s a fairly large financial incentive for hospitals to control these. Before that, the financial incentive was perverse. It paid to have these infections.”
