Deadly by the hour. Dang.
Quote:
http://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medi...bfcL&ocid=iehp
Oscar-winning actress Patty Duke, star of "The Patty Duke Show" and the Broadway play and film “The Miracle Worker,” died of sepsis from a ruptured intestine on Tuesday.
Simple though it may seem, her death announcement is a major milestone for the sepsis awareness movement, said Thomas Heymann, executive director of the Sepsis Alliance. The more people are aware of this condition, Heymann said, the stronger their likelihood of saving their own lives or the lives of their loved ones.
"The fact that they said Patty Duke’s cause of death was sepsis is relatively new," Heymann said. "It very often would have been left as a complication of surgery or an infection, but it’s not a complication -- it’s sepsis."
Sepsis, a reaction to infection that leads to systemic organ failure, kills more than 258,000 Americans every year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, making it the ninth-leading cause of disease-related deaths in the country. While most people can fully recover from sepsis, some survivors are left with permanent organ damage or missing limbs due to amputation.
Despite these alarming facts, less than half of Americans have even heard of sepsis, according to polls conducted by the Sepsis Alliance in partnership with official polling companies. In a 2015 online survey of 2,000 participants, only 47 percent of Americans were aware of sepsis. Meanwhile, 86 percent knew about Ebola and 76 percent knew about malaria -- two diseases that are much rarer in the United States.
People who have sepsis experience organ dysfunction caused by their body’s overreaction to an initial infection, whether viral, bacterial or fungal. This overreaction is overwhelming for the body, and can lead to death. It’s most common in people with compromised immune systems, like the very young, the very old and those with chronic diseases like AIDS, cancer, or diabetes. But people can also develop sepsis from a simple scrape, wound or burn that was not properly cleaned.
Sepsis is also on the rise: It was the primary or secondary cause of 1.6 million hospitalizations in 2009, more than double the sepsis-related hospitalizations in 1993, according to a report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. And it was the single most expensive reason for hospitalizations in 2009, adding up to nearly $15.4 billion in hospital costs.
Sepsis can hide in plain sight
In one highly publicized, tragic story, a 12-year-old boy named Rory Staunton scraped his arm while playing with friends in 2012 and eventually began vomiting and complaining of pain in his leg. Doctors sent him home with Tylenol, but three days later he died from severe septic shock.
Rory's case highlights a major difficulty doctors face: Sepsis symptoms can be hard to discern from those of a simple infection that could go away on its own.
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