A revealing article about Sepsis by Saira Khan is in The Sunday Mirror. Sepsis is a killer and as Ms. Khan says, “it’s the biggest killer you’ve never heard of.”
Dr. Ron Daniels, founder of the UK Sepsis Trust, says, “Often patients are discharged from hospital completely unaware that they’ve had sepsis. They could be admitted with a chest infection and end up in extensive care with multi organ failure, but they think they’ve just had pneumonia, not realising it was sepsis.
Sepsis, or as older people will know it, maybe wrongly, as Septicaemia, is a serious complication of an infection. Without quick treatment, sepsis can lead to multiple organ failure and death. And as Ms. Khan points out it was estimated to have led to the deaths of 44,000 people last year.
It is a condition that arises when the body’s response to infection causes injury to its own tissues and organs. Sepsis is sometimes referred to as septicaemia or blood poisoning but strictly speaking septicaemia means invasion of bacteria into the bloodstream, whereas sepsis can effect organs inside the body without blood poisoning.
There are three stages of Sepsis:
1). Sepsis – infection is present, or probably present, and there are symptoms including high or low temperature, fast heart rate, fast breathing rate.
2). Severe sepsis – when the infection starts to interfere with the functioning of organ of the body.
3). Sceptic shock – symptoms and signs of severe sepsis, plus blood pressure drops to dangerous levels despite appropriate treatment, and organs are prevented from getting enough oxygenated blood.
Ms. Khan concludes by advising people to go to sepsistrust.org for valuable information on how to detect it and learn what to do if you suspect you or a loved one has it.