One in 25 Patients Get Hospital Infections: CDC Report

One in 25 hospital patients in the United States have at least one infection they contracted during their hospital stay, according to two new reports released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

According to the reports, the CDC has updated previous estimates about healthcare associated infections (HAIs) now estimating that any given time, one in 25 hospital patients are suffering from an infection they acquired from hospital staff or instruments.

One report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine details the national HAI estimates determined from survey data acquired from hospitals in ten U.S. states selected to serve as a representative sample of the entire country.

In the study, 183 U.S. hospitals were assessed. According to the report, an estimated 721,800 infections occurred in 648,000 patients in 2011. Alarmingly, approximately 75,000 of those patients died still infected with one or more HAIs. It remained unclear if the HAIs were the leading cause of death, but it is very common for infection to cause unforeseen complications in surgical patients and the very ill.

Of these infections, 22 percent were pneumonia, 22 percent were surgical site infections, 17 percent were stomach and/or intestine infections, 13 percent were infection of the urinary tract, and 10 percent were bloodstream infections. Staph infections and E. coliinfections were reported to be the most common bacterial infections. CDC investigators also reported an alarming trend in E. coliinfections that suggested that the bacteria is becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics, but further evidence will need to be found to confirm this.

Thankfully, not everything is bad news. Despite reports of increasingly resistant bacteria spreading across the world including the U.S., CDC investigators have found that the rate of certain HAIs has actually decreased between 2008 and 2012.

According to a 2012 annual report on national and state-specific HAI prevention goals, blood-stream infections in hospitals have decreased by 44 percent. Infections resulting from surgical procedures also decreased by 20 percent since 2008, and between 2011 and 2012 there was a 2 percent decreased in C. difficile HAIs.

An extensive summary of the reports is detailed in a CDC press release published on March 26.