Sepsis Kills

Sepsis is a life-threatening organ dysfunction from dysregulated infection response, with 49 million global cases annually resulting in 11 million deaths. The total global costs of sepsis care annually is $2.4 trillion (sepsis.org).

Infections arising anywhere in the body, if left untreated, can enter the bloodstream, resulting in a bloodstream infection (BSI). Once bacteria or fungi-related bloodstream infection occur, the risk of infection-related sepsis, and attendant mortality, rises up to 7.6% for each hour that effective treatment is delayed. (Kumar et al.)¹ (Liu et al.)²

For every hour that effective antibiotic therapy is delayed, the risk of mortality increases by as much as 7.6%. (Kumar et al.)¹ (Liu et al.)² This is the deadly math behind the shocking number of sepsis deaths.

And where effective antimicrobial therapy is administered, frequently two or three antimicrobials are administered simultaneously as "empiric therapy," resulting in adverse effects that may have lifelong consequences for the patient:

• Kidney failure
• Life-threatening secondary infections such as C. difficile
• Blindness

Doctors wait to tailor, or de-escalate, antibiotic therapy until they have clinical confidence that the infection will be treated by at least one of the antibiotics administered. The antimicrobial susceptibility test, commonly known as "sensitivity results" or AST, is the definitive diagnostic value for which doctors wait to tailor therapy with clinical confidence.