September is, as you may know, Sepsis Awareness Month. I try to highlight the condition each year as it is nearly two years since my father in law nearly died from it.

The Sepsis Alliance in the UK are marking the month by an extensive awareness camplaign with some great food for thought!

“How can a small dog’s nip on the hand or a bug bite result in a battle to stay alive? How does someone go from the happiest day of her life, delivering her child, to being in an intensive care unit on a ventilator – with her family not knowing if she will live or die? How can someone who successfully undergoes a bone marrow transplant to beat cancer die because he got an infection?

These people all had something in common: they developed sepsis, an illness that fewer than half of Americans have ever heard of, yet every two minutes, another person in the country dies of it.

Sepsis is expensive for its victims and for society. It costs more than $17 billion per year to treat sepsis in hospitals in the U.S. The burden in lost income and expenses after initial sepsis treatment isn’t known.

Financial issues post sepsis can range from the inability to continue working in previous jobs to needing long-term care. Cost to the government and tax-payers? Fifty-eight percent of sepsis admissions had Medicare as the primary payer versus 36% for other hospitalizations.”

To find out more about signs, symptoms and treatments for sepsis check out our blog post here.