Reply #44: Blood poisoning still kills people every day

[du_grad]

Antibiotics can work, but they have to be given early enough. We report out 10-20 positive blood cultures a day (or more, some days), and that's just our lab. Labs all over the country deal with these on a daily basis. Our lab does the microbiology work for three hospitals, 25+ nursing homes, and other outpatient outreach. Most blood cultures are drawn on in-house patients or very sick nursing home patients. Sepsis is NOT a thing of the past.

Our preliminary reports on positive blood culture specimens are considered critical reports and they are called to the floor/doctor immediately. They can be life threatening and patients must get antibiotics quickly or they can die.

Sulfa drugs are still in use, but they have been supplanted by many other antibiotics as bacteria have changed their susceptibility patterns and antibiotics have changed.

Many antibiotics are anything but cheap and harmless. MRSA, especially in positive blood cultures, continues to be a problem for many ICU patients. Daptomycin is ten times more expensive than Vancomycin, which is currently about the only drug that can be used against MRSA in positive BC's. Dapto is really really really expensive and infectious disease docs are starting to use it in non-responsive septic MRSA patients. Vanco is also really expensive, and blood levels must be monitored to keep the dosage in therapeutic range. Usage of lifesaving antibiotics can deal a second blow: Clostridium difficile pseudomembranous colitis. C. diff is a real big problem in hospitals also, and strains of it are showing up as resistant to antibiotics. When you throw all of these bacteria off their balance, nasty things happen in the body that aren't pretty.

Believe me, you DON'T want to have septicemia in a hospital setting nowadays.