Is sepsis getting worse or is awareness getting better?

[FusionChefGeoff]

A very close family friend died a few weeks ago. SIL was treated post MMC. The papers seem to be full of fatalities and the speed of the disease combined with seemingly no effective treatment is really scaring me.

Is it going to be the pandemic that lowers the population or is it just a huge awareness campaign that is, hopefully, working???

Sorry for your loss

There's been a huge campaign and health professional training to diagnose and treat sepsis much sooner. The press are only reporting the fatalities, not the many cases that are treated successfully.

A load of stuff we never called sepsis in the past is now called sepsis eg chest sepsis, urosepsis etc - when I first qualified these would be chest infections and pyelonephritis. So loads of people are being successfully treated for sepsis every day, but a few years back many of them would never have been told they had sepsis.

There is a big awareness campaign which the press has cottoned on to and reports about.

The however many 1000s of preventable deaths is pure guff as a large proportion of the deaths are occurring in the frail elderly and simply aren't preventable - these aren't the cases that make the headlines as cases that should have been prevented.

It's not getting worse, just higher up on the health agenda and new diagnosis tools at an earlier stage to indeed prevent the related death.

We have a sepia screening tool on our work iPods, if observations are slightly out of normal range it will pop up and make you consider if it could be sepsis, and tell you what to do next. There has been a huge amount of work done in my hospital on sepsis awareness.

I've been wondering the same thing OP.
Have just watched Starfish on Netflix, film about Tom Ray who lost both arms and legs and part of his face from sepsis 20 years ago. Shocking how clueless the Drs were in A&E, and how badly his facial reconstruction was done.
I think/hope things have got better since then.

It does seem to be increased awareness then which is better than the alternative

And true, papers will always report on the drama and not the everyday successful treatments.

I'm just so afraid of how quickly something that has very few warning signs can escalate into something so deadly.